Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
Sep 1999
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1999dda....31.0904n&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, DDA meeting #31, #09.04
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
Scientific paper
HST observations of the ring--plane crossings in May, August and November 1995 showed that the edge-on brightness of Saturn's rings is dominated not by the classical A and B rings, but by the narrow, irregular F Ring (Nicholson et al., [1996] Science 272, 509; Bosh & Rivkin [1996] Ibid 272, 518). Located 3500 km exterior to the outer edge of the A ring, and bounded by the small satellites Prometheus and Pandora, the F ring is ~ 50 km wide, optically thin at normal incidence angles, and exhibits a multi-stranded appearance in high resolution Voyager images (Murray et al. [1997] Icarus 129, 304). Occultation observations in 1980/81 and 1989 show a single strand which is well-fitted by a precessing keplerian ellipse with semimajor axis 140209 km and e = 0.0029. A stellar occultation observed by HST on 22 November 1995, just after the solar ring plane crossing and at a terrestrial incidence angle of only 2.7 deg, revealed that the F ring is inclined at an angle of 0.0062 deg to the plane of the main rings (Olkin & Bosh [1996] BAAS, 28, 1125). This non-zero inclination, which corresponds to a vertical amplitude a sin i = 15 km, also manifests itself in the partial eclipse of the F ring by the A ring in the November HST images. By precessing the ring back to the Earth ring plane crossing of 10 August, we find that the curious east-west asymmetry in the brightness of the main rings noted at this time - which is the principal source of uncertainty in the crossing time (Nicholson & French [1997] BAAS 29, 1097) - is apparently due to partial obscuration of the A and B rings by the inclined F ring. By chance, the Earth crossing of 22 May occurred when the line of nodes pointed to the Earth, and no such asymmetry was seen. Photometric models of the edge-on ring brightness should permit us to determine both the thickness and radial optical depth of the F ring, and eventually to refine the ring plane crossing time to within an uncertainty of a few minutes .
Bosh Amanda S.
French Richard G.
Nicholson Philip D.
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