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Dust and spacecraft charging in Saturn's E ring

Kempf, Sascha; Horányi, Mihály; Hsu, Hsiang-Wen

The electrostatic potential of a spacecraft reflects the local physical conditions and also affects the in situ thermal plasma measurements. In this work we focus on the spacecraft charging in the high dust density region near Enceladus in Saturn's E ring. In a dust-rich environment, the spacecraft charging is modified by the complex (dusty) plasm…

The orientation of Titan's dayside ionosphere and its effects on Titan's plasma interaction

Brecht, Stephen H.; Ledvina, Stephen A.; Cravens, Thomas E.

A hybrid particle code has been used to examine how Titan's interaction with Saturn's magnetosphere is effected by the orientation of the dayside ionosphere with respect to the incident magnetospheric flow. The hybrid code self-consistently includes a version of Titan's ionosphere represented by 7 generic ion species, over 40 ionneutral chemical r…

Sublimation temperature of circumstellar dust particles and its importance for dust ring formation

Kimura, Hiroshi; Müller, Sebastian; Kobayashi, Hiroshi +2 more

Dust particles in orbit around a star drift toward the central star by the Poynting-Robertson effect and pile up by sublimation. We analytically derive the pile-up magnitude, adopting a simple model for optical cross sections. As a result, we find that the sublimation temperature of drifting dust particles plays the most important role in the pile…