Temporal and seasonal changes in Titan's stratosphere over a Titanian year

Details Temporal and seasonal changes in Titan's stratosphere over a Titanian year Temporal and seasonal changes in Titan's stratosphere over a Titanian year

Dec 2010

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2010agufm.p31c1544c&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2010, abstract #P31C-1544

Physics

[5405] Planetary Sciences: Solid Surface Planets / Atmospheres, [5410] Planetary Sciences: Solid Surface Planets / Composition, [5749] Planetary Sciences: Fluid Planets / Origin And Evolution, [6281] Planetary Sciences: Solar System Objects / Titan

Scientific paper

In this work we have taken advantage of one full year (~30 Earth years) of Titan space exploration in order to look for seasonal variations in temperature and composition as the season on Titan progresses moving from spring equinox (at the time of the two Voyager spacecraft encounters in 1980 and 1981) to almost a full cycle after 6 years of Cassini-Huygens exploration. We have probed Titan’s stratosphere using CIRS nadir spectra taken since 2004, averaging and binning them over 10° in latitude for both medium (2.5 cm-1) and high (0.5 cm-1) spectral resolutions. Titan composition and temperature latitudinal variations from CIRS data were previously inferred in a number of works (Flasar et al., 2005; Coustenis et al., 2007, 2010; Vinatier et al., 2007, 2009; Teanby et al., 2006, 2007, 2008; Bampasidis et al., 2010, in preparation and references therein). Here, we have looked for temporal variations in Titan's stratosphere (100-500 km in altitude roughly) since the Voyager encounters. The results (Coustenis et al., 2010, in preparation) show that the gases generally increase in abundance from 2004 to 2009 in the northern hemisphere and decrease in the southern in agreement with (Teanby et al. 2008). When compared to the Voyager data (res=4.3 cm-1), we find the current mixing ratio values for the gaseous components to be lesser in the Northern hemisphere with a possible indication for interannual variations, because - for at least some of the species - the abundances will not reach the enhancement in the North found in 1980 (Coustenis and Bézard, 1995). The contrary trends are observed in the South. We also compare with the disk-average results from ISO (1997; Coustenis et al., 2003). With this study we seek to set constraints on seasonal, photochemical and circulation models and to make predictions as to the spatial variations of the chemical composition on Titan for the upcoming years, when the season will finally become exactly the one of the Voyager encounter in 1980 and then move towards summer solstice in the north during the Cassini extended Solstice mission. References Coustenis, A., Bézard, B., Icarus 115, 126, 1995. Coustenis, A., et al., Icarus 161, 383, 2003. Coustenis, A., et al., Icarus, 189, 35, 2007. Coustenis, A., et al., Icarus 207, 461, 2010. Flasar, F. M., et al., Science, 308, 975, 2005. Teanby, N., et al., Icarus 181, 243, 2006. Teanby, N., et al., Icarus 186, 364, 2007. Teanby, N., et al., Icarus 193, 595, 2008. Vinatier, S., et al., Icarus, 188, 120, 2007. Vinatier, S., et al., Icarus, 205, 559, 2010.

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