The Determination Of Titan's Rotational State From Cassini SAR Images

Details The Determination Of Titan's Rotational State From Cassini SAR Images The Determination Of Titan's Rotational State From Cassini SAR Images

Dec 2007

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2007agufm.p21d..08p&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2007, abstract #P21D-08

Physics

1229 Reference Systems, 5724 Interiors (8147), 5744 Orbital And Rotational Dynamics (1221), 5754 Polar Regions, 6281 Titan

Scientific paper

SAR images acquired by the spacecraft Cassini in overlapping strips have been used to determine the vectorial angular velocity of Titan. The method entails the tracking of surface landmarks at different times (and mean anomalies). Cassini radar observations have provided so far 14 high resolution image pairs of the same portion of Titan surface, spanning a period from 2004 to 2007. Each image is referenced both in an inertial frame and in the IAU, Titan-centric, body-fixed reference frame. This referencing is quite precise, as the position of Cassini relative to Titan is known with an accuracy smaller than 100 m during each flyby.
The IAU body-fixed frame assumes a spin axis different from the actual one. Therefore, in this putative frame a landmark appears at different geographic coordinates in the two observations. By correlating the two images of the same surface region, one gets a two-dimensional vector, which retains information about the true spin axis. This vector provides the magnitude and direction of the displacement to be applied to a reference point of each image in order to produce maximum correlation. The correlation results therefore in a new Titan-centric, inertial referencing of the images, R(t1) and R(t2). The spin axis s is then obtained by requiring that [R(t2) - R(t1)]
s = 0 for each overlapping image pairs. Due to experimental errors (dominated by image correlation errors and inaccuracies in the spacecraft orbit relative to Titan) the left hand sides cannot be simultaneously zeroed and the spin axis must be determined by means of a least square procedure. The magnitude of the angular velocity is then derived from the angle between the vectors R(t1) and R(t2) and the known time difference between the two observations. Our analysis indicates that the Titan pole coordinates are consistent with the occupancy of the fourth Cassini state. The uncertainties are obtained assuming a realistic error of 250 m in the reconstruction of the inertially- referenced vectors. Titan's rotational state is therefore more complex than expected. If Titan were a rigid body in a Cassini state (with an icy crust anchored to the mantle), one could use theoretical arguments to derive the moment of inertia from the obliquity and the second degree gravity field. However, the new findings suggest that those theoretical arguments cannot be straightforwardly applied.

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