Beuthe, Mikael ; Rivoldini, Attilio

Poster presented at American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting 2019, San Francisco on 2019-12-10

Abstract: In a ten year span, the spacecraft Cassini made nine gravity passes among a total of 124 flybys of Titan. The resulting Doppler data have recently been interpreted in terms of a gravity field solution up to harmonic degree and order 5. With its global shape expanded up to degree and order 8, Titan is the icy satellite with the best-known gravity and topography. The simultaneous analysis of these datasets is typically used to constrain the internal structure, in particular the thickness of the icy shell overlying the subsurface ocean. Titan’s gravity anomalies are strongly compensated, which could be explained by a thin shell in isostatic equilibrium, whereas the weak correlation between gravity and topography suggests internal heterogeneities maintained by a sufficiently thick shell. On the basis of these two observations, we shall constrain the thickness of the icy shell.

Keyword(s): Titan ; gravity ; crust ; moment of inertia
Note: AGU poster reference: P23D-3523
Links: link
Funding: Belgian PRODEX program managed by ESA in collaboration with the Belgian Federal Science Policy Office/Belgian PRODEX program managed by ESA in collaboration with the Belgian Federal Science Policy Office/Belgian PRODEX program managed by ESA in collaboration with the Belgian Federal Science Policy Office