Titan, fractals, and filtering of Cassini altimeter data

Author

Franceschetti, Giorgio ; Callahan, Philip S. ; Iodice, Antonio ; Riccio, Daniele ; Wall, STEPHEN D.

Author_Institution

Dept. of Electron. & Telecommun. Eng., Univ. of Naples "Federico II"

Volume

44

Issue

8

fYear

2006

Firstpage

2055

Lastpage

2062

Abstract

Fractal behavior of one Titan profile acquired by the Cassini altimeter during its first flyby is demonstrated and quantitatively analyzed. The inadequacy of popular nonfractal models to represent scale-dependent behavior is also discussed. Our results lead to the conjecture that a proper geometrical model of the Titan surface is provided by the fractional Brownian motion stochastic process and that the particular acquired profile has a fractal dimension of about 2.4. In addition, use of the developed statistical model allows the design of model-based filters for a significant improvement of the measurement accuracy, at the expense of the horizontal resolution

Keywords

fractals; planetary satellites; radar altimetry; remote sensing; space vehicles; stochastic processes; Cassini altimeter; Titan surface; extraterrestrial exploration; filtering; fractal dimension; fractals; fractional Brownian motion; radar altimetry; stochastic process; Atmospheric measurements; Extraterrestrial measurements; Filtering; Filters; Fractals; Geologic measurements; Noise measurement; Solid modeling; Stochastic processes; Surface fitting; Extraterrestrial exploration; filtering; fractals; radar altimetry;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Geoscience and Remote Sensing, IEEE Transactions on

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0196-2892

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/TGRS.2006.872152

Filename

1661794