Radial plasma transport in Saturn's magnetosphere (Invited)

Details Radial plasma transport in Saturn's magnetosphere (Invited) Radial plasma transport in Saturn's magnetosphere (Invited)

Dec 2010

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2010agufmsm32a..03h&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2010, abstract #SM32A-03

Physics

[2756] Magnetospheric Physics / Planetary Magnetospheres, [2760] Magnetospheric Physics / Plasma Convection

Scientific paper

Radial plasma transport in the magnetosphere of Saturn, like that of Jupiter, is driven by the centrifugal force of (partial) corotation acting on internally generated plasma. A significant difference is that the internal plasma source is evidently broadly distributed throughout the inner magnetosphere of Saturn (4 < L <~12), although the neutral water vapor source is evidently tightly localized to Enceladus (L = 4). At Jupiter, by comparison, both the neutral and plasma sources are evidently largely confined to the Io plasma torus (L ~ 6-7). A possible consequence of the broadly distributed source at Saturn is the observed feature that convective outflow channels are relatively broad and slow, while the corresponding inflow channels are relatively narrow and fast. This feature is well documented by Cassini observations (primarily CAPS and MAG), and reproduced in numerical simulations (RCM) that contain a distributed plasma source, although it has not, to my knowledge, been explained by an analytical theory containing an active plasma source. Both planets exhibit strong magnetospheric modulations near the planetary spin period, probably indicating a persistent longitudinal asymmetry of the radial plasma transport process. At Jupiter such an asymmetry is readily understood as a consequence of the dramatic asymmetry of the intrinsic planetary magnetic field. This is not so at Saturn, where any such field asymmetry is known to be very modest at best. In neither case has the precise nature of the asymmetry been identified either observationally or theoretically.

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