The Source of Saturn's Plasma

Details The Source of Saturn's Plasma The Source of Saturn's Plasma

Dec 1999

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1999baas...31.1588r&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS Meeting #31, late abstracts, #59.25; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 31,

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

Voyager observations of the plasma in Saturn's magnetosphere combined with Voyager and Hubble observations of neutral H and OH, respectively, set fairly stringent limits on the plasma source. We review these constraints and show that published sputtering sources are significantly below the required source rate. We combine plasma and high energy ion spectra and recalculate the sputtering of satellites and E-ring and model the resulting OH cloud. Like the previous sputtering estimates, our total sputtering source falls short of that required to account for the observed OH densities. However, the radial distribution of sputtered particles shows that the 'missing' source is near Enceladus. This strongly suggests that the E-ring might be the dominant plasma source in the inner magnetosphere. We speculate that a possible explanation is the presence of more material in the E-ring, most likely a substantial component of smaller submicron grains, in addition to the one micron particles already observed.

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