The Galois closure of Drinfeld modular towers

In this article we study Drinfeld modular curves X0(pn) associated to congruence subgroups Γ0(pn) of GL(2,Fq[T]) where p is a prime of Fq[T]. For n>r>0 we compute the extension degrees and investigate the structure of the Galois closures of the covers X0(pn)→X0(pr) and some of their variations. The results have some immediate implications for the Galois closures of two well-known optimal wild towers of function fields over finite fields introduced by Garcia and Stichtenoth, for which the modular interpretation was given by Elkies.