Cassini/RPWS Dust Measurements During the Enceladus Flybys in 2008

Details Cassini/RPWS Dust Measurements During the Enceladus Flybys in 2008 Cassini/RPWS Dust Measurements During the Enceladus Flybys in 2008

May 2009

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2009agusmsm13a..03w&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Spring Meeting 2009, abstract #SM13A-03

Physics

6213 Dust, 6280 Saturnian Satellites

Scientific paper

The Cassini spacecraft completed four very close flybys of Enceladus in 2008 on days 072, 224, 283, and 305. All flybys were targeted to fly the spacecraft through the water vapor plume near the south pole of this tiny but energetic moon. At closest approach, the spacecraft was merely several tens of kilometers away from the moon's surface, providing good opportunities for the RPWS instrumentation to measure the parameters of micron-sized particles in the water plume. As the spacecraft approached the water plume, the RPWS dipole antenna started recording intense impulsive noise indicating substantially increased dust impacts. A Gaussian distribution can be fit to the impact rate. For all four flybys, the peak impact rate is around 600 to 800 per second, the corresponding peak number density is about 7.2 × 10-2m-3 to 9.6 × 10-2m-3, and the half thickness of the Gaussian distribution is around 1600 km. The dust particles in the plume are thought to have radii less than 10 micrometers. Due to the limitation of the RPWS lower threshold on detecting dust hits, only dust particles larger than one micrometer can be precisely measured. An RPWS frequency-time spectrogram on DOY 224 indicates that the peak of the intensity of dust impacts occurred five minutes later than the peak of the electron density. In this presentation, we will discuss the variation of dust flux as a function of distance from the south pole of Enceladus, the mass and size distribution, and comparisons of these optical depth measurements.

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