Saturn's F ring: Kinematics and Particle Sizes from Stellar Occultation Studies

Details Saturn's F ring: Kinematics and Particle Sizes from Stellar Occultation Studies Saturn's F ring: Kinematics and Particle Sizes from Stellar Occultation Studies

Oct 2000

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2000dps....32.4807b&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS Meeting #32, #48.07; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 32, p.1087

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Scientific paper

We observed the 1995 occultation of GSC5249-01240 by Saturn's rings with the Faint Object Spectrometer on the Hubble Space Telescope. These data provide spectrally-resolved chords across the narrow F ring, at wavelengths from 3540 to 7075 Å. The F ring's equivalent depth is found to have no significant dependence on wavelength, indicating the presence of a population of ring particles larger in size than approximately 10 microns. This contrasts with the results from a previous analysis of Voyager images at various phase angles (Showalter et al. 1992, Icarus 100, 394), in which the particles were determined to be predominantly sub-micron in size. The difference may be due to temporal or longitudinal variability within the ring. When combined with other occultation data, we determine the orbital parameters for the F ring (Bosh et al. Icarus, submitted): a = 140223.7 +/- 1.7 km, e = 0.00253 +/- 0.00005, longitude of pericenter = 24.3 +/- 1.3 deg, pericenter precession rate = 2.7001 +/- 0.0003 deg day-1, i = 0.0067 +/- 0.0012 deg, longitude of ascending node = 16.0 +/- 3.0 deg, node regression rate = -2.6877 deg day-1. The reference time is the J2000 epoch. Our inclined F ring orbit model explains an abrupt decrease in flux at the west ansa of the ring that was observed during the November 1995 ring-plane crossing (Nicholson et al. 1996, Science 272, 509) as well as the non-detection of 1995 S5 during one set of observations (Roddier et al. 2000, Icarus 143, 299). This research was supported in part by NASA Grant NAG5-6826.

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