Observations and Models of Iapetus's Microwave Emissivity

Details Observations and Models of Iapetus's Microwave Emissivity Observations and Models of Iapetus's Microwave Emissivity

Jan 2012

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2012aas...21930102r&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #219, #301.02

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

Iapetus is one of the most unusual moons in the solar system and is best known for its stark hemispherical albedo contrast at optical wavelengths. However, only a handful of previous observations have explored whether this contrast also manifests itself in the thermal emission. While Iapetus's daytime infrared brightness temperature only varies by about 10K, our observations with the Green Bank Telescope (GBT) have shown that Iapetus's microwave brightness temperature at the Ka-Band (26-40 GHz) can vary by as much as 60K, with effective emissivities dropping to less than 0.3 on the bright trailing hemisphere. We have also observed that the variation is substantially less at 3.3 mm. This behavior is unprecedented in the astronomical literature, but not entirely unprecedented in the literature from the remote sensing branch of climate science. Climate scientists have made extensive studies of Earth's microwave emissivities from 10 to 200 GHz and found similarly shaped features in dry snowpacks and glaciers. Here we present an attempt to model Iapetus's microwave emissivity using various snow models from the climate science literature and report on the final observations from a GBT observing campaign.
This research has been supported by the NRAO pre-doc program and the Virginia Space Grant Consortium graduate fellowship program.

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