Evidence for Enceladus Link to Saturn Ionosphere: Does the Plume Have an Auroral Footprint?

Details Evidence for Enceladus Link to Saturn Ionosphere: Does the Plume Have an Auroral Footprint? Evidence for Enceladus Link to Saturn Ionosphere: Does the Plume Have an Auroral Footprint?

May 2009

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2009agusm.p32a..06r&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Spring Meeting 2009, abstract #P32A-06

Physics

2407 Auroral Ionosphere (2704), 2721 Field-Aligned Currents And Current Systems (2409), 5443 Magnetospheres (2756), 6275 Saturn, 7807 Charged Particle Motion And Acceleration

Scientific paper

It is increasingly well accepted that, despite its diminutive size, the tiny icy moon Enceladus is the dominant source of water group neutrals and charged particles throughout Saturn's magnetosphere through the copious gas and dust emanations from its South pole. During two recent Cassini flybys the spacecraft plasma instruments were oriented such that they looked along a magnetic flux tube nominally connecting the Enceladus plume to Saturn's ionosphere. Two of the remarkable discoveries from these observational campaigns were, 1) high energy (10s-100s of keV) field aligned ion beams propagating from Saturn toward the plume and 2) lower energy field aligned electron beams which were observed to 'flicker' in energy from 10s of eV to several 100 eV. Initial speculation was that this is evidence of an Alfven wing type interaction, such as exists at Io due to significant mass loading in the wake of the moon. It was subsequently realised that the magnetic field signature is not consistent with this simple picture, leading us to speculate that there exists a more filamentary Birkeland current system with the observed variability linked to the highly dynamic and variable nature of the Enceladus outgassing. Ions could be accelerated by wave activity or field-aligned potential drops just above the ionosphere, but we have yet to ascertain if either is sufficient to explain the observed very high energy ion beams. Additionally we will show that similar phenomena exist near the L-value of Enceladus, but away from the moon - implying the existence of a significant extended Enceladus plasma torus.

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