Estimating And Mapping The 5-micron Albedo Of Titan's Surface From Cassini Vims Observations

Details Estimating And Mapping The 5-micron Albedo Of Titan's Surface From Cassini Vims Observations Estimating And Mapping The 5-micron Albedo Of Titan's Surface From Cassini Vims Observations

Sep 2008

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2008dps....40.2309s&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #40, #23.09; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 40, p.429

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The dense, hazy, methane-rich atmosphere of Titan introduces substantial difficulty in obtaining information about the absolute albedo of Titan's surface. While several groups are working to obtain full radiative-transfer solutions to the problem, some useful approximations are possible in the interim, particularly at the longest wavelengths where scattering is reduced and thin-atmosphere approximations become appropriate. In this work, we make use of a series of four near-IR observations of Ontario Lacus, obtained on the 38th flyby of Titan by the Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer on board the Cassini spacecraft. These data were acquired under fortuitous observational geometries, such that the incidence and phase angles remain nearly constant between the four observations, while the emission angles vary from 40° - 80°. Such data allow a relatively straightforward extrapolation of the data to zero airmass. We then leverage the information gained about the atmospheric transmission to estimate the attenuation of the incident solar irradiance. With this information we are able to estimate the absolute albedo of the surface of Titan, in this case the center of Ontario Lacus found to be nearly zero (see Brown et al 2008, doi:10.1038/nature07100). Future sets of VIMS observations of this type (sampling a range of emission angles) will allow estimation and mapping the 5-micron albedo of a variety of surfaces including other lakes, dunes, and surfaces bright and dark at optical and radar wavelengths. Funding for this research was provided by the Cassini Project managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology.

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