A Depth Profile of Titan's Ontario Lacus and Further Constraints on Wave Heights from Cassini RADAR Data

Details A Depth Profile of Titan's Ontario Lacus and Further Constraints on Wave Heights from Cassini RADAR Data A Depth Profile of Titan's Ontario Lacus and Further Constraints on Wave Heights from Cassini RADAR Data

Oct 2010

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2010dps....42.5503w&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #42, #55.03; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 42, p.1076

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

1

Scientific paper

Hayes et al. (JGR 2010) observed that the Cassini synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging magnitudes collected over Titan's Ontario Lacus vary exponentially with distance from the lake shore, as expected if there is a deepening liquid layer that is attenuating the reflection from a roughened bottom. They deduce near-shore slopes on the order of 10-3. Here, we extend this analysis across the entire width and length of the lake by applying the Hayes et al. approach to the real-aperture (beam-averaged) scatterometry and SAR mode data collected on Titan flyby T65 (12-January-2010). The real-aperture reduction provides longer integration times, thereby reducing the noise in the data. Consequently, we can detect bottom reflections from greater depths within the lake.
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We create a depth profile along the diagonal of the lake using the T65 SAR mode data, assuming the dielectric properties inferred by Hayes et al. apply uniformly across the lake volume. The 8 km SAR beam footprint slightly smears out the actual depth profile. Nearly perpendicular to this track, the T65 scatterometry data, with 15 km footprints, yields a coarser depth profile across the dark waist of Ontario Lacus. The two profiles intersect at the darkest, and likely deepest, region of the lake. The shape of these profiles has implications for the lake geology.
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Allowing for scatter from small-scale waves on the surface of the lake, we constrain the maximum depth of the dark region to be less than 9 meters over our km-scale resolution cell. Depths over the rest of the lake are less than 5 meters. These shallow depths may have implications for the lake's composition. We also model the rms wave heights to be less than 1 mm, consistent with the analysis of Wye et al. (GRL 2009). These are all conservative upper limits.

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