Morning drizzle on Titan

A press release issued by the European Southern Observatory on Friday described "a widespread and persistent morning drizzle of methane over the western foothills of Titan's major continent, Xanadu." The release was titled "Take an umbrella if you plan to visit Titan!" which is cute, but you need a lot more than an umbrella to visit Saturn's moon Titan! Don't forget oxygen and a suit that can project you against temperatures of minus 183 Celsius (minus 300 Fahrenheit), but I suppose you can leave your pressure suit at home, as the surface air pressure is only 60% more than Earth's, not too uncomfortable.

Anyway, the release had to do with an article recently published in Science Express by Máté Ádámkovics and several coauthors, "Widespread morning drizzle on Titan," which discusses some neat processing tricks performed on infrared images taken at the Very Large Telescope and Keck to retrieve information about the distribution of liquid and solid methane drizzle and clouds in Titan's atmosphere. As I'm not an atmospheric scientist or an infrared astronomer I got a little bit lost in the details of how their tricky processing worked, but here's my attempt at a simplified version. Images taken in different wavelengths probe to different levels in the atmosphere; if they're taken in "methane windows," they can see to the surface, but if they're taken on the edges of these windows, they represent radiation that got only penetrates partway through the atmosphere. By subtracting images taken at different wavelengths, you can remove the effects of the surface or upper atmosphere, leaving behind radiation that interacted with a specific atmospheric level -- that is, they essentially took pictures of Titan's stratosphere and troposphere. The dark splotches in the two bottom images represent methane clouds and drizzle in the troposphere, which is the slice of atmosphere nearest to the ground. The drizzle is visible in two sets of images taken on different days, showing slightly different views of Titan; in both observations, the drizzle disappears after 10:30 local solar time.

There's one part about the press release that bothers me, though. They lead with that statement that the morning drizzle arises because a humid airmass is being pushed up above "the western foothills of Titan's major continent, Xanadu." Now, people have long suspected that Xanadu, which is the largest, brightest feature visible in pre-Cassini images of Titan's surface, is a high-standing continent. But there's actually no global topographic map that indicates whether Xanadu is really higher than everything else. Locally, it certainly seems to display steep topography; here's a closeup from a "T13" Cassini RADAR image captured in April 2006:

Because of its size and reflectivity it had been proposed that Xanadu is an elevated continent. But it is not. A new topography-from-SAR technique shows that along the T13 Radar swath which completely transects Xanadu, the average topographic elevation is indistinguishable from that of the surrounding terrain. There are many mountains with peaks locally rising up to 1-2 kilometers, but the average elevation of the T13 pass is 200 m +/- 300 m lower than the radius of Titan. The highest point is near the swath center. Photogeologic interpretation suggests that Xanadu slopes to the south; three major river systems begin in the north and flow southward. ... Its eroded-looking terrain, large number of possible eroded impact craters, dune encroachment on its western edge, and apparent detached patches of similar material near its margins all suggest that Xanadu is a relict terrain, currently being disaggregated.

If it's not topography, what could be causing the drizzle? Well, if published authors can speculate wildly, then I can too. Xanadu may not be high, but it does have lots of river systems (which may not be flowing currently, but at least you can say they're younger than Xanadu itself), which is in sharp contrast to the much drier-looking sand dune areas to its west and east. Maybe there's drizzle there because it's a wetter part of Titan to begin with. Maybe Xanadu really is low-standing, so the "methane table" is close to the surface, which breathes methane into the atmosphere in the afternoon and at night, only to see it condense and then drizzle down in the morning.. Is that wild enough speculation for you? Like I said, I'm not an atmospheric scientist, so I probably don't know what I'm talking about!

For fun, here's the most recent Cassini ISS map of Titan, which is beginning to see interesting features in the far north as spring approaches there. Xanadu is easy to pick out; it's the brightest big splotch on the right side of the map, roughly centered on Titan's leading hemisphere. This map was part of a slew of public releases issued in celebration of the 10 years since Cassini's launch; go check them out on JPL's Photojournal. I notice that Photojournal has finally succumbed to the "One NASA" common look and feel that NASA is trying to enforce across all of its various centers' websites.