Thermal Inertia of Saturn's Rings Measured by CIRS Cassini

Details Thermal Inertia of Saturn's Rings Measured by CIRS Cassini Thermal Inertia of Saturn's Rings Measured by CIRS Cassini

Sep 2008

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2008dps....40.2907l&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #40, #29.07; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 40, p.444

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

Over the last 4 years, the Cassini infrared spectrometer has obtained more than 300000 spectra of the Saturn's rings system. The FP1 detector, sensitive to the 17-1000 microns range, has been used to derive the temperature and the filing factor of rings, observed at different phase angles, spacecraft elevations and azimuths, and different Solar elevations. At such wavelengths, the thermal skin depth is limited to few millimeters so we are able to probe the regolith and subsurface properties
The thermal emission of rings depends not only on particles properties (albedo, thermal inertia of the regolith, spin rate and orientation), but also on ring properties (optical depth, local dynamic, vertical structure). Deriving the thermal inertia from the azimuthal variations of the temperature requires taking into account the mutual heating and shadowing between particles and the dynamical interaction between particles. The cooling down and the heating up of ring particles depends also on their dynamics.
Analyzing the azimuthal variations of the ring temperatures with the phase angle, we have derived the thermal inertia of the A, B and C main rings and also the Cassini division and the trans-Encke region in the outer part of the A ring. For optically thin rings (C and the Cassini division), we use a monolayer approach and assume a bimodal size distribution with either synchronous or fast rotators (Leyrat et al, 2008). For the optically thick A and B rings, where self-gravity wakes have been detected (Colwell et al, 2006 and 2007 ; Hedman et al., 2008), we compute the radiative transfer in a system of regularly spaced elliptical bars (Hedman et al., 2007) in order to take into account of the presence of clumps in such rings.
We present our results and compare with values found in Saturnian's icy satellites.

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