Physics – Geophysics
Scientific paper
Nov 2001
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2001dps....33.2906d&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, DPS Meeting #33, #29.06; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 33, p.1093
Physics
Geophysics
2
Scientific paper
Saturn's moons Prometheus and Pandora, the putative shepherds of the F Ring, orbit Saturn at rates that differ significantly from the rates at the time of the Voyager flybys in 1980/1981 (C. A. McGhee et al., Icarus 152, 282-315, 2001). Specifically, Prometheus is running slow, and Pandora is running fast. Soon after Prometheus' lag was discovered, collisions between Prometheus and the F Ring, occurring every ~19 years when their apses were anti-aligned, were proposed to explain the lag (C. D. Murray and S. M. Giuliatti Winter, Nature 380, 139-141, 1996). Pandora's orbital advance cannot be explained in this way, since it does not come as close to the F Ring as Prometheus does. Instead, chaos is likely to be important for Pandora (F. Poulet and B. Sicardy, MNRAS 322, 343-355, 2001). The recent discovery that Prometheus and Pandora have nearly equal and opposite longitude anomalies suggests that their motions are coupled (R. G. French et al., this meeting). We will present numerical integrations of bodies with orbits similar to those of Prometheus and Pandora, and will discuss ways in which two- and three-body resonances involving Saturn's inner moons might couple the orbits. We thank the NASA Planetary Geology & Geophysics program for grants to LD, HFL, JJL, and RGF, and to STScI for grant GO-06806.01-95A to RGF.
Dones Luke
French Richard G.
Levison Harold F.
Lissauer Jack . J.
McGhee Colleen Anne
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