Titan Plumes Revisited

Details Titan Plumes Revisited Titan Plumes Revisited

Dec 2008

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2008agufm.p12a..09e&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2008, abstract #P12A-09

Physics

2732 Magnetosphere Interactions With Satellites And Rings, 6275 Saturn, 6281 Titan

Scientific paper

At the time of the Voyager 1 close encounter with Titan, enhancements of density and sharp decreases of electron temperature were observed by the PLS instrument. A few smaller plumes were identified inside and outside Titan orbit and their displacements correlated with variations in solar wind dynamic pressure observed by Voyager PLS one and two corotation periods earlier. At the time, two conflicting interpretations of this phenomenon were proposed. In one interpretation (Eviatar et al., JGR, 87, 8091, 1982, the enhancements were regarded as plumes drawn out of the ionosphere of Titan by the corotation electric field. The secondary enhancements were taken to be old plumes that had been wrapped around Saturn, had begun to decay and to merge into the magnetosphere environment. An alternative interpretation, proposed by Goertz (GRL, 1983, 10, 455), viewed them as blobs of plasmas detached by flute or Kelvin-Helmholtz instability from the central body of Saturn plasma in the inner magnetosphere. The Voyager PLS instrument was unable to make a firm composition determination which would have resolved the question. In this study, we use Cassini/CAPS data to identify plumes and blobs of plasma and classify them by source by means of composition and temperature. We find that all three types of plasma bodies, primary plumes, secondary wrapped around plumes and sloughed off blobs exist in the Titan-dominated region of the magnetosphere.

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