Mass Loading Plasma from the Enceladus Water Plume

Details Mass Loading Plasma from the Enceladus Water Plume Mass Loading Plasma from the Enceladus Water Plume

Sep 2006

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2006dps....38.1507b&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #38, #15.07; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 38, p.509

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Scientific paper

Before the arrival of Cassini at Saturn, the principle source of neutrals and plasma in the inner magnetosphere was unknown. Observations of an extensive OH neutral cloud (Shemansky et al., Nature, 363, 329, 1993) could not be explained through the known neutral sources (Jurac et al., GRL, 29, 2172, 2002). The active volcanism discovered at Enceladus' south pole by Cassini, which sends water gas and ice grains into orbit around Saturn, is now known to be the primary source of neutrals, although other processes are responsible for producing the extended clouds formed from these neutrals (Johnson et al. ApJ Lett, in press). Ionization of these neutrals provides the primary source of magnetospheric ions.
We present a model of the gaseous component of Enceladus' water plume consistent with the observations by UVIS (Hansen et al., Science, 311, 1422, 2006) and INMS (Waite et al., Science, 311, 1419, 2006) from the 14 June 2005 flyby of Enceladus by Cassini. These observations imply a neutral gas escape rate of 300 kg/s from the south polar region.
Interactions between these escaping neutrals and Saturn's magnetospheric plasma produce fresh pickup ions. Although the dominant ion production mechanism is charge exchange, which does not affect the total plasma content, these ions must be accelerated by the magnetosphere, and therefore can be detected by their influence on the magnetic field and background plasma. Based on our plume model and measurements of the plasma from the Cassini Plasma Spectrometer (Tokar et al., Science, 311, 1409, 2006), we estimate the mass loading rate near Enceladus. We also estimate the magnitude of the velocity change in the plasma resulting from the input of fresh ions.
This work is supported in part by the NASA Postdoctoral Program.

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