Dual Frequency Orbiter-Radar System for the Observation of Seas and Tides on Titan: Extraterrestrial Oceanography from Satellite
- Creators
- Mastrogiuseppe, Marco
Abstract
Saturn's largest moon, Titan, is believed to have a ~100 km thick ice shell above a global ocean of liquid water. Organic materials, including liquid hydrocarbon lakes and seas in its polar terrain, cover Titan's surface, which makes it a world of two oceans. The RADAR instrument on board Cassini, was able to probe lakes and seas during few dedicated altimetric observations, revealing its capability to work as a sounder. Herein, we describe the design of, and scientific motivation for, a dual frequency X/Ka-band radar system that is able to investigate Titan's subsurface liquid water ocean, as well as the depth and composition of its surface liquid hydrocarbon basins. The proposed system, which could take advantage of the telecommunications dish, can operate as a sounder, as Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) able to map the surface at tens meters of scale resolution, and when data are acquired from close-adjacent orbits, as a repeat-pass SAR interferometer (InSAR). The instrument, which is based on the architecture of the Cassini RADAR, can also characterize Titan's interior by using geophysical measurements of the tidal amplitude to derive high accuracy estimates of the Love number h2 from a 1500 km circular orbit.
Additional Information
© 2019 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Received: 16 July 2019; Accepted: 6 August 2019; Published: 14 August 2019. This research was funded by NASA, grant number [80NM0018D004]. The author was originally supported by the Italian Space Agency. The author is grateful to Charles Elachi and Steve Wall for the fruitful discussions about the Cassini mission and the interpretation of RADAR data. The author would also thanks Marica Raguso, Valerio Poggiali and Alex Hayes, whose comments helped to improve the quality of this work. The authors declare no conflict of interest. The funders had no role in the design of the study; in the collection, analyses, or interpretation of data; in the writing of the manuscript, or in the decision to publish the results.Attached Files
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 97881
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20190814-094822889
- 80NM0018D004
- NASA
- Created
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2019-08-14Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-16Created from EPrint's last_modified field