Thermal Phase Curves of Saturn's Main Rings with Cassini CIRS

Details Thermal Phase Curves of Saturn's Main Rings with Cassini CIRS Thermal Phase Curves of Saturn's Main Rings with Cassini CIRS

Oct 2007

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2007dps....39.0701s&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #39, #7.01; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 39, p.419

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

Temperatures for the lit and unlit rings were retrieved using data from the Cassini Composite Infrared Spectrometer (CIRS). Scans of Saturn's main rings (A, B C and Cassini Division) were obtained over a variety of ring geometries, including phase angle, ring local time and ring opening angle. The thermal characteristics of each main ring vary with viewing geometry. Ring temperatures decrease with increasing solar phase angle on both the lit and unlit sides of the rings. The characteristic shapes of the phase curves vary with changing solar elevation angle.
We present a preliminary report on the thermal phase curves obtained during the first three years of the Cassini mission. The outer B ring exhibits a thermal surge in temperature greater than 10 K at low phase angles. Our first attempt at modeling the thermal phase curves is presented, using parameterized shadowing functions and a double Henyey-Greenstein function as described in the standard Hapke model. We discuss the signification of the retrieved parameters as potential input for forward-modeling of Saturn's ring thermal properties.
This research was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with NASA and at CEA Saclay supported by the "Programme National de Planetologie".

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