Mapping Europa's Thermophysical Properties from Galileo PPR

Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy

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Scientific paper

The Galileo Photopolarimeter-Radiometer (PPR) instrument mapped thermal infrared radiation from Jupiter and the Galilean satellites. We use the resulting brightness temperatures at a range of local times to map the thermal properties of Europa's surface, namely bolometric albedo and thermal inertia. Ten high-quality PPR observations were identified based on their coverage and lack of noise. We divided the surface of Europa into 10 degree bins and searched the high-quality data for points in each of those bins. We sorted through the bins to find those with observations near noon and at night, as comparison of these times provides the most robust constraint on thermal properties. For each of these bins, we fit a thermal model to determine the thermal inertia and bolometeric albedo of that bin. Our resulting maps of these quantities cover only the subset of the surface where sufficient data was obtained: a band near the anti-Jovian point and a thinner band near 310 W longitude. Allowing for the low resolution of our maps, our thermally-derived albedos appear to correlate with the albedo features observed in the Galileo SSI basemap. The thermal inertia maps provide a unique probe of the cm-scale properties of Europa's surface, and thus constrain surface processes. Knowledge of diurnal temperatures also allows estimation of the detectability of endogenic hot spots. The improved knowledge of Europa's surface temperature distribution provided by these temperature maps and derived thermophysical properties will also aid in the design of thermal instrumentation to search for endogenic activity on future Europa missions.

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