A moon’s spiky tail: Low energy electron enhancements in the plasma wake of Enceladus

Details A moon’s spiky tail: Low energy electron enhancements in the plasma wake of Enceladus A moon’s spiky tail: Low energy electron enhancements in the plasma wake of Enceladus

Dec 2009

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2009agufm.p51c1142k&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2009, abstract #P51C-1142

Physics

[2732] Magnetospheric Physics / Magnetosphere Interactions With Satellites And Rings, [6000] Planetary Sciences: Comets And Small Bodies, [6200] Planetary Sciences: Solar System Objects, [6280] Planetary Sciences: Solar System Objects / Saturnian Satellites

Scientific paper

Enceladus resides deep within Saturn’s magnetosphere. The magnetospheric plasma incident on the satellite is absorbed, forming a thermal plasma wake downstream of the moon, and a cavity in higher energy populations. When the Cassini spacecraft crosses Enceladus’s L-shell, these cavities are observed as brief dropouts in energetic particle fluxes, or microsignatures, most clearly observed by the Magnetospheric Imaging Instrument (MIMI). A survey of thermal plasma observations by the Cassini Plasma Spectrometer (CAPS) instrument has revealed the existence of enhancements in low energy electrons close to the times of microsignatures, or immediately before or after their occurrence. These features sometimes appear as a single electron flux enhancement but are often observed to appear as a set of discrete spikes, covering electron energies of 9-15 eV and lasting, intermittently, up to tens of minutes. We present the results of a survey of these perplexing features and suggest possible causes for their occurrence. We rule out dust impacts and spacecraft charging as potential causes, and investigate the possibility of plasma instabilities in Enceladus’s wake being responsible for their presence. We also present possible links between the spikes and coincident fluctuations in the magnetometer data.

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