Physics
Scientific paper
Dec 2008
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2008agufm.p21a1320s&link_type=abstract
American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2008, abstract #P21A-1320
Physics
6280 Saturnian Satellites, 6281 Titan
Scientific paper
The recent discovery of hydrocarbon lakes at Titan's North Pole by the Radio Detection and Ranging (RADAR) instrument onboard the Cassini spacecraft is one of the most exciting discoveries of the Cassini-Huygens mission. Previous analyses of terrestrial coastlines have revealed them to be closely approximated by self-similar fractals. Coastline length increases as the measuring scale decreases because smaller measuring scales are sensitive to smaller features of the coastline. The measured perimeter can be related to the measuring scale by a power law whose exponent is 1-D, where D is the fractal dimension. The value of D provides a means to quantify the complexity (ruggedness) of a coastline with higher values indicating higher complexity. As pooled liquids form equipotential surfaces, coastlines are equivalent to topographic contour lines. The complexity of a coastline can therefore be related to the complexity of the surface it is embedded in through fractal theory. Thus, a statistical characterization of Titan's topography can be extracted through analysis of these shorelines. We have carried out this analysis for coastlines on Titan and have related the coastline roughness parameters to topography parameters for Titan's landscape. In this study, we used projected Cassini Radar observations (resolution of about 350m/pixel near the centre of the swath). The shorelines of 290 of these North Polar Titanian lakes have been manually outlined at the full resolution of the dataset. Their fractal dimensions were calculated via two methods: the ruler method and the box-counting method. Our results show Titan's coastlines do exhibit fractal properties with fractal dimensions comparable to published estimates of the terrestrial coastlines of Britain and Germany. Such high values of this roughness parameter show that Titanian coastlines are intricate by terrestrial standards, which implies a rugged landscape. We will report on this statistical characterization of Titan's topography and spatial variations in landscape roughness.
Byrne Shane
Sharma Pankaj
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