Evidence for the exposure of water ice on Titan's surface

Computer Science

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Scientific paper

Saturn's largest moon, Titan, is hypothesized to possess an exotic surface. Veiled by a smoggy stratosphere, oceans and deep layers of organic sediments (hundreds of meters thick) are hypothesized to cover the icy bedrock. In order to investigate the composition of the moon's surface, my colleagues (Toby Owen, Thomas Geballe, John Rayner, and Pascal Rannou) and I have analyzed observations of Titan's leading and trailing hemisphere from 0.5-5.0 um. These new spectra, fully connected, allow us to constrain the haze opacity, and ultimately the surface albedo within 8 spectral regions in between optically thick methane bands. Our study builds on prior investigations of narrower spectral regions by revealing Titan's albedo over a large wavelength region needed to discern the broad bands of surface constituents. We find that Titan's leading and trailing surface albedos throughout this spectral region remarkedly resemble that of the leading hemisphere of Ganymede. Thus we find that water features dominate Titan's disk-integrated surface spectrum, as opposed to the organic sediments that continually precipitate from Titan's stratosphere.

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