Thermal Mapping in Saturn's Main Rings wih Cassini CIRS

Details Thermal Mapping in Saturn's Main Rings wih Cassini CIRS Thermal Mapping in Saturn's Main Rings wih Cassini CIRS

Sep 2006

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2006dps....38.4706s&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #38, #47.06; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 38, p.573

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

Spatially resolved thermal infrared scans of Saturn's main rings (A, B and C, and Cassini Division) were obtained by the Cassini Composite Infrared Spectrometer (CIRS) over a broad range of wavelengths, from 7 μm to 1 mm (1400 to 10 cm-1). Temperatures were retrieved for the lit and unlit rings over a variety of ring geometries, including phase angle, ring local time and ring opening angle. The thermal characteristics of each main ring vary with ring geometry. Ring temperatures decrease with increasing solar phase angle on both the lit and unlit sides of the rings, indicative of a population of relatively large, fairly slowly spinning ring particles. From azimuthal scans across the shadow boundaries, ring particles entering the shadow were found to cool relatively quickly, indicative of a low thermal inertia.
For the B and A rings, the temperature is correlated with optical thickness when viewed from the lit side, and anti-correlated when viewed from the unlit side. On the unlit side of the B ring, not only do the lowest temperatures correlate with the largest optical depths, these temperatures are the same at both low and high phase angles, suggesting that little sunlight is penetrating these regions and that vertical mixing is limited across the densest part of the B ring.
The A ring shows the smallest temperature variation with phase angle, and this variation decreases with increasing ring radius. This decrease in thermal contrast suggests a larger number of smaller, and/or more rapidly rotating ring particles which have more uniform temperatures with phase angle, resulting perhaps from stirring by density waves and gravitational wakes.
This research was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with NASA and at CEA Saclay supported by the "Programme National de Planetologie".

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