The DISR imaging mosaic of Titan’s surface and its dependence on emission angle

Abstract

The DISR (Descent Image/Spectral Radiometer) imagers took about 300 images during the descent of the Huygens probe in Titan’s atmosphere. We combined them into a photometrically calibrated mosaic of Titan’s surface within 100 km of the Huygens landing site with a resolution ranging from 1 km at 100 km distance from the landing site to 50 cm near the landing site. We analyzed how the reflectivity of each location varies with the changing phase angle and emission angle during the descent. We found strong variations with the emission angle but no significant variation of the surface phase function. The latter is possibly obscured by the diffuse nature of illumination by Titan’s sky at visible wavelengths. We constructed a map of this emission angle dependence, which represents a measure of surface reflectivity and roughness of the terrain. Titan’s surface probed by the images shows various terrain types with a small correlation between reflectivity and roughness. We propose that variations in the emission angle dependence might be correlated with average tilt angles of the surface. We detected elevated terrain in the bright highland north of the landing site as published by Soderblom et al. (Soderblom, L.A. et al. [2007]. Planet. Space Sci. 55, 2015–2024), but their high ridges in the lakebed appear mostly flat in our analysis. We integrated the color information from the DISR spectrometers into our mosaic to create a color map. We also compared the features seen in maps of the reflectivity, the emission angle dependence, and color to features seen in Cassini RADAR images. Finally, we provide a refined version of the images from Huygens after landing down to a resolution of 2 mm.