Have Titan's North-Polar Lakes Changed?

International audienceCassini's RADAR instrument acquired a SAR swath over Titan's north polar lakes on May 22, 2012 , providing repeat images of a number of the smaller lakes. Previous coverage of these lakes was obtained on various passes in 2006 and 2007. Among the principal objectives of the Cassini mission is to monitor the liquid in the lakes with the approach of northern summer. Evidence of change in the lakes' levels might consist of shoreline changes, changes in radar backscatter (e.g. as penetration increases or dry spots appear), or combinations of these. We have chosen ten lakes and lake complexes for study, ranging from -4 to -100 km largest dimension. Visual comparison of repeat images is complicated by the dissimilar imaging geometry and (in some cases) resolution, and by SAR speckle. There are ambiguous cases that require further study, but at this writing we cannot identify certain changes. Ambiguous cases will be analyzed by using electromagnetic models, which can also take into account different acquisition geometry. Further analysis will be carried out exploiting electromagnetic scattering models and inversion approaches (e.g., Bayesian) to provide estimate of the lake parameters and any related changes. Parts of the research described in this paper were carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration