Feeding of Saturn's E ring by Enceladus' plumes

Details Feeding of Saturn's E ring by Enceladus' plumes Feeding of Saturn's E ring by Enceladus' plumes

Aug 2007

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2007epsc.conf..806b&link_type=abstract

European Planetary Science Congress 2007, Proceedings of a conference held 20-24 August, 2007 in Potsdam, Germany. Online at ht

Physics

Scientific paper

Since July 1st 2004, the Cassini spacecraft has been exploring the Saturnian system, which is distinguished by a pronounced ring system. In particular, Saturn's diffuse E ring is the largest planetary ring of the solar system ranging from 3RS (Saturn's radius RS = 60 330 km) to approximately Titan's orbit. The vertical ring thickness is 8 000 km at Enceladus orbit and 15 000 km at the outer rim of the ring. On July 14th 2005, Cassini performed a close encounter at the icy moon Enceladus - the dominant E ring dust source. The shortest distance to the moon's surface was 175 km what is well inside the moon's sphere of gravitational influence. The CDA data obtained during this flyby can only be explained by a collimated dust source at the south pole area of the moon. This finding finally led to the discovery of a strong cryo-volcanism in this region replenishing the ring with fresh dust. Here, we present model calculations for dust grains ejected at Enceladus' south pole into the ring. We show that only grains 14ms-1 faster than the moon's three-body escape speed do not re-collide with Enceladus during their first orbit and thus be able to populate the ring. Our numerical results match the CDA data reasonably well. In particular, our findings explain the vertical extent of the ring as derived from the in-situ observations.

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