Loss from Saturn's E Ring through ion pick-up

Details Loss from Saturn's E Ring through ion pick-up Loss from Saturn's E Ring through ion pick-up

May 2005

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2005agusm.p21c..06l&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Spring Meeting 2005, abstract #P21C-06

Physics

2730 Magnetosphere: Inner, 5737 Magnetospheres (2756), 5759 Rings And Dust, 6265 Planetary Rings, 6275 Saturn

Scientific paper

When the neutrals that compose Saturn's E ring are exposed to solar radiation or impacting energetic particles, they become ionized at a rate of the order of 10-9/s. Within Saturn's magnetosphere, any newly created ions will be accelerated by the electric field associated with the corotating magnetized plasma. If the energy the ions gain in this pick-up process is sufficiently great, they will then begin to produce magnetic oscillations at a characteristic frequency. When Pioneer 11 and Voyager 1 passed through this region of the saturnian system, their magnetometers both observed intervals of such waves whose frequencies point to water-group ion sources. The magnetometer onboard the Cassini spacecraft has also observed these water-group ion cyclotron waves. The range of coverage from the multiple passes allow us to analyze their variation in space and time. The water-group ions that create these waves represent a loss of material from the neutral E ring so, by studying the ion cyclotron waves as a proxy for mass loading, we can quantify the rates of erosion of the E ring through ionization and magnetospheric transport.

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