Rate of radial transport of plasma in Saturn’s inner magnetosphere

Details Rate of radial transport of plasma in Saturn’s inner magnetosphere Rate of radial transport of plasma in Saturn’s inner magnetosphere

Dec 2009

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2009agufmsm23c1625c&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2009, abstract #SM23C-1625

Physics

[2700] Magnetospheric Physics, [2760] Magnetospheric Physics / Plasma Convection, [6275] Planetary Sciences: Solar System Objects / Saturn

Scientific paper

The Cassini Plasma Spectrometer (CAPS) and the Cassini Magnetospheric Imaging Instrument (MIMI) frequently observe longitudinally localized injection and drift dispersion of hot plasma in Saturn’s magnetosphere. These signatures provide direct evidence for the major convective process in the inner magnetosphere of a rapidly rotating planet, in which the radial transport of plasma comprises hot, tenuous plasma moving inward and cooler, denser plasma moving outward. These injection events have been found to occupy only a small fraction of the total available longitudinal space, indicating that the inflow speed is probably much larger than the outflow speed. We set the local corotation speed as the upper limit of inflow velocities, and deduce the corresponding radial velocities of the outflowing flux tubes by analyzing the width of injection structures and assuming that the total potential drop around a given L-shell is zero. We then estimate an upper limit to the plasma outward mass transport rate, which turns out to be somewhat larger than previous estimates of the Enceladus source rate (e.g., Pontius and Hill, 2006). An important assumption in this study is that the plasma is largely confined to a thin equatorial sheet, and we have applied a centrifugal scale height model developed by Hill and Michel [1976].

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