How the Enceladus dust plume forms Saturn's E ring

Details How the Enceladus dust plume forms Saturn's E ring How the Enceladus dust plume forms Saturn's E ring

Sep 2008

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2008epsc.conf..773b&link_type=abstract

European Planetary Science Congress 2008, Proceedings of the conference held 21-25 September, 2008 in Münster, Germany. Online a

Physics

Scientific paper

Before Cassini, dynamical models of Saturn's E ring [1] failed to reproduce its peculiar vertical structure inferred from earth-bound observations [2]. After the discovery of an active ice-volcanism in the south pole terrain of Saturn's icy moon Enceladus the relevance of these particles for the vertical ring structure was swiftly recognise [3, 4]. However, ad-hoc models for the plume particle injection predict too a small vertical ring thickness and overestimate the amount of the injected dust. Here we report on numerical simulations of the plume particles ejection into the ring. We run a large number of dynamical simulations including gravity and Lorentz force to investigate the earliest phase of the ring particle life span. The evolution of electrostatic charge carried by the initially uncharged grains is treated selfconsistently. Freshly ejected plume particles are moving in almost circular orbits because the Enceladus orbital speed exceeds the particles' ejection speeds by far. Only a small number of the ejected grains survives against re-collision with the moon during their first orbit. Because of this, the flux as well as the size distribution of the plume particles replenishing the ring particle reservoir differs significantly from the size distribution and flux of the Enceladus dust plumes. Our numerical simulations reproduce the vertical ring profile measured by the Cassini dust instrument CDA [4] and is consistent with edge-on images obtained by the Cassini camera ISS [5]

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