Other
Scientific paper
Apr 2003
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2003eaeja....14152p&link_type=abstract
EGS - AGU - EUG Joint Assembly, Abstracts from the meeting held in Nice, France, 6 - 11 April 2003, abstract #14152
Other
Scientific paper
The composition of Saturn's rings is a critical constraint on their origin and evolution. A better knowledge of this parameter will help us to solve big questions: Are the rings old or are we privileged to live at a special time in history? Is the ring composition suggest an affinity with ongoing micrometeoride infall, or preserve the primordial initial composition? Can we solidify a genetic relation between moons and rings? Water ice has long been accepted as the most prominent component of ring composition based on a combination of near-IR and microwave observations. The discovery of a reddening between 0.3 and 0.8 μm requires the presence of some additional non-icy material which could be best modeled by a small amount of a redddish absorber such as Titan tholin. However, since the Voyager encounters with Saturn, the composition of the rings has received little attention in terms of observation and modeling relative to their complex structure. This talk will present the spectral analysis of recent near-infrared observations of Saturn's rings, obtained with the spectrometer SpeX mounted on the NASA IRTF Telescope. These observations combined with recent photometric observations acquired by HST in the 0.3-1.0 μm range are the first one combining an extended spectral range (0.8-5.5 μm), medium spectral resolution (˜ 1000)and spatial resolution (about 1 arcsec) which is sufficient to distinguish the three main ring components (A, B and C rings) from one another. The spectra are modeled with a radiative transfer model to constrain the relative abundances and the grain sizes of the water ice, a dark component (amorphous carbon) required to adjust the albedo and a second contaminant to reproduce the reddening in the UV-visible range. The preferred contaminant for ring particles is some organic material represented here by tholins mixed with water ice particles as an intra-mixture. An important result is that the dark component of the C ring spectrum is included as an intra-mixture only, which could suggest an older "original" material. Eventually, the comparison of the ring make-up with the surface composition of Saturn's satellites and Centaurs will be done and the genetic relation between satellites and rings discussed.
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