Titan by Radar: Seas, Surface Properties, and the Road to Dragonfly

Titan’s dense atmosphere conceals a remarkably Earth-like landscape shaped by dunes, rivers, lakes, seas, and possible remnants of past hydrologic environments. The Cassini RADAR investigation provided our first detailed view of this surface and enabled measurements extending well beyond imaging. In this talk, I will review how radar sounding was used to measure the depths and constrain the composition of Titan’s northern seas, as well as how Cassini’s bistatic radar observations are revealing the roughness and dielectric properties of both liquid and solid surfaces. I will then discuss ongoing and proposed investigations of radar backscatter, Titan’s widespread plains, possible paleoseas, and candidate cenote-like depressions, illustrating how the Cassini archive continues to generate new scientific questions nearly a decade after the mission’s conclusion. Finally, I will look ahead to NASA’s Dragonfly mission, whose in-situ measurements and aerial exploration will connect Cassini’s global remote-sensing perspective with the composition, physical properties, and geological history of Titan’s surface.

Speaker: Valerio Poggiali, Cornell University

Room 350-372