Other
Scientific paper
May 2002
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2002agusm.p22a..07s&link_type=abstract
American Geophysical Union, Spring Meeting 2002, abstract #P22A-07
Other
5464 Remote Sensing, 5470 Surface Materials And Properties, 5480 Volcanism (8450), 6218 Jovian Satellites
Scientific paper
Given its rapid resurfacing rate, many different types of volcanic resurfacing activity, and extremely wide range of colors, albedos, and temperatures, it is not surprising that Io exhibits probably the most diverse set of different photometric behaviors of any object in the Solar System, at least in terms of the various solid, airless surfaces that have viewed by remote sensing. To give just one example that has been emphasized recently by Simonelli et al. and Geissler et al. (in the Dec. 2001 issue of JGR Planets), different parts of the surface of Io have radically different phase curves---i.e., they darken with increasing solar phase angle at radically different rates---and these phase curves can also vary significantly with wavelength, especially towards the green-to-violet part of the spectrum. The end result is that Io's visual appearance changes radically with phase for purely photometric reasons. And these radical changes occur both globally and locally: on moving from low to high phase (e.g., from 0 deg phase to 80 deg phase), the equator, measured relative to the polar regions, switches from being the brightest, whitest part of Io to being a dark, dull grey; individual areas such as those surrounding Ra Patera and Marduk get much brighter relative to their surroundings; and other individual areas, including warm high-latitude lava flows such as Lei-Kung Fluctus, get much darker relative to their surroundings. We need a better understanding of the distribution of---and the physical causes behind---these photometrically induced changes in appearance, not only for their own sake but because they (1) complicate the search for new plume- or lava-related resurfacing events that occur between Galileo orbits, and (2) have major implications for how bolometric albedo---the ``energy balance albedo" that governs insolation-based surface temperatures---is distributed across the surface of Io. We will present highlights of the photometrically induced changes in appearance exhibited on Io as seen by Galileo, and review some of the region-to-region variations in regolith properties that have been proposed as the physical cause behind these changes. Promising examples of the latter include equator-to-pole variations in the average size of the particles in Io's regolith (as proposed by Galileo's NIMS team), and local variations in the presence or transparency of a frost layer (as proposed by Geissler et al.).
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