Temperature Variations with Changing Solar Elevation in Saturn's Main Rings as Seen by Cassini CIRS

Details Temperature Variations with Changing Solar Elevation in Saturn's Main Rings as Seen by Cassini CIRS Temperature Variations with Changing Solar Elevation in Saturn's Main Rings as Seen by Cassini CIRS

Sep 2008

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2008dps....40.2404s&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #40, #24.04; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 40, p.430

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Scientific paper

During four years in orbit around Saturn, the Cassini Composite Infrared Spectrometer (CIRS) has acquired an extensive set of thermal measurements of Saturn's main rings (A, B, C and Cassini Division). Temperatures were retrieved for the lit and unlit rings over a variety of ring geometries that include solar phase angle, spacecraft elevation, solar elevation and local hour angle. To first order, the largest temperature changes on the lit face of the rings are driven by variations in phase angle while differences in temperature with changing spacecraft elevation and local time are a secondary effect.
Once phase angle and local time effects are taken into account, decreases in ring temperature with decreasing solar elevation are observed for both the lit and unlit faces of the rings. For the lit rings,decreases of 2- 4 K are observed in the C ring and larger decreases, 7-10 and 10 - 13 K, are observed in the A and B rings respectively. Our thermal data cover a range of solar elevations from -21 to -12 degrees (south side of the rings). We test two simple models to assess how well they fit the observed decreases in temperature. The first model assumes that the particles are so widely spaced that they do not cast shadows on one another while the second model assumes that the particles are so close together they essentially form a slab. The optically thinnest and optically thickest regions of the rings show the best fits to these two end member models. We present a preliminary report on ring temperature variations as a function of solar elevation in Saturn's rings.
This research was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with NASA. Copyright 2008 California Institute of Technology. Government sponsorship acknowledged.

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