Molecular Oxygen Ions in Saturn's Inner Magnetosphere for the First 24 Cassini Orbits

Details Molecular Oxygen Ions in Saturn's Inner Magnetosphere for the First 24 Cassini Orbits Molecular Oxygen Ions in Saturn's Inner Magnetosphere for the First 24 Cassini Orbits

Dec 2007

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2007agufm.p43a1032m&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2007, abstract #P43A-1032

Statistics

2730 Magnetosphere: Inner, 5709 Composition (1060), 5737 Magnetospheres (2756), 5780 Tori And Exospheres

Scientific paper

We present an analysis of molecular oxygen ions in Saturnś inner magnetosphere for the first 24 orbits of Cassini about Saturn. Apoapses of these orbits have local times between 3 and 8 MLT. Data from the Ion Mass Spectrometer (IMS) are summed to achieve better statistics and to bring out features that are otherwise difficult to resolve from an individual orbital pass. In particular, O2+ is well-resolved by this method. Through a combination of peak fitting and baseline subtraction, we isolate O2+ counts from the tail of the W+[O+, OH+, H2O+, H3O+] mass distribution, and from background radiation. We detect O2+ from L = 4.5 out to L = 11 with high confidence, and tentatively detect O2+ inward to L = 3.5 and outward to L = 12. Molecular oxygen ions were initially reported to account for approximately 1-2% of the total ion population in the inner magnetosphere based on IMS data from the inbound Saturn orbital insertion (SOI) pass [Young et al., 2005]. Through refined analysis techniques, we have found O2+ to account for approximately 0.5% of the W+ peak at L = 4.5 with only minor fluctuations in relative density out to L = 12. The mean O2+ energy lies above co-rotation, but nevertheless tracks theoretical co-rotation out to L = 9.5, beyond which its energy falls.

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