Hydrogen in the Saturn magnetosphere

Details Hydrogen in the Saturn magnetosphere Hydrogen in the Saturn magnetosphere

Dec 2011

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2011agufmsm14a..04s&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2011, abstract #SM14A-04

Physics

[2730] Magnetospheric Physics / Magnetosphere: Inner

Scientific paper

This paper examines the impact of the sources of neutral hydrogen populating the Saturn magnetosphere. The considerations in the calculations include source rates, physical chemistry of weakly ionized plasma affecting populations, magnetospheric and solar forcing rate processes, energy balance, and observational limits. The Saturn magnetosphere is dominated by atomic hydrogen from the top of the Saturn atmosphere to beyond the magnetosphere bow shock. The hydrogen sourced by Saturn has been estimated to extend to at least 100 RS from system center. The main source of HI is the top of the low latitude Saturn atmosphere, estimated to be ˜3. ± 1030 s-1 . Known H2 sources, Titan at ˜1028 s-1, Enceladus at ˜3 ± 1026 s-1 are relatively minor. H2 has never been detected in the magnetosphere. The present work explores the properties of H2 as a limiting factor. Solar photon processes have been recalculated; the standard for these rates has been Heubner et al. (1992). It has been found in the present calculations that there is disagreement with the Heubner rates, particularly for kinetic energy in 2H(1s) production where the current results give product energies an order of magnitude below the Heubner 8.2 eV value . Water chemistry is modeled in the core of the plasma sheet directly relating the state of the plasma sheet electrons to the magnetospheric and solar energy deposition processes, and providing detailed calculated partitioning of the weakly ionized gas, H2O, OH, H2, O2, OI, HI, H+, O+, H2O+,H3O+, H2+, OH+, O2+. The calculations include detailed solar photo dissociation, ionization, and dissociative ionization of LTE and non-LTE H2. The predicted state of non-LTE H2 has been calculated, and detailed emission at the rotational level has been predicted for the magnetosphere in the present work. The ion/neutral ratio as a function of forcing for a pure hydrogen low density weakly ionized plasma has been calculated.

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