HST UV Images of Saturn's Aurora Coordinated with Cassini Solar Wind Measurements

Details HST UV Images of Saturn's Aurora Coordinated with Cassini Solar Wind Measurements HST UV Images of Saturn's Aurora Coordinated with Cassini Solar Wind Measurements

Jul 2003

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2003hst..prop10083c&link_type=abstract

HST Proposal ID #10083

Computer Science

Hst Proposal Id #10083 Solar System

Scientific paper

A key measurement goal of the Cassini mission to Saturn is to obtain simultaneous solar wind and auroral imaging measurements in a campaign scheduled for Jan. 2004. Cassini will measure the solar wind approaching Saturn continuously from 9 Jan. - 6 Feb., but not closer to Saturn due to competing spacecraft orientation constraints. The only system capable of imaging Saturn's aurora in early 2004 will be HST. In this community DD proposal we request the minimum HST time needed to support the Cassini mission during the solar wind campaign with UV images of Saturn's aurora. Saturn's magnetosphere is intermediate between the "closed" Jovian case with large internal sources of plasma and the Earth's magnetosphere which is open to solar wind interactions. Saturn's aurora has been shown to exhibit large temporal variations in brightness and morphology from Voyager and HST observations. Changes of auroral emitted power exceeding one order of magnitude, dawn brightenings, and latitudinal motions of the main oval have all been observed. Lacking knowledge of solar wind conditions near Saturn, it has not been possible to determine its role in Saturn's auroral processes, nor the mechanisms controlling the auroral precipitation. During Cassini's upcoming approach to Saturn there will be a unique opportunity to answer these questions. We propose to image one complete rotation of Saturn to determine the corotational and longitudinal dependences of the auroral activity. We will then image the active sector of Saturn once every two days for a total coverage of 26 days during the Cassini campaign to measure the upstream solar wind parameters. This is the minimum coverage needed to ensure observations of the aurora under solar wind pressure variations of more than a factor of two, based on the solar wind pressure variations measured by Voyager 2 near Saturn on the declining phase of solar activity. The team of proposers has carried out a similar coordinated observing campaign of Jupiter during the Cassini flyby, resulting in a set of papers and HST images on the cover of Nature on 28 February 2002.

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