Pickup Ion Signatures in the Vicinity of Titan

Abstract:

Being the only moon in the solar system with a significant atmosphere, Titan possesses an ionosphere that acts as a conducting obstacle to the incoming plasma from Saturn's magnetosphere. This creates a mass-loading of the magnetic field lines with freshly picked up ions from Titan's atmosphere on a process similar to that observed in comets (e.g. Coates et al. (1993), Journal of Geophysical Research, Vol. 98, No. A12, 20985-20994) and other moons like Jupiter's Io (e.g. Russell et al. (2003), Planetary and Space Science, Vol. 51, 233-238). However, while at other celestial bodies ion cyclotron waves arise as one of the main signatures of this process, this is not the case at Titan, with e.g. Cowee et al. (2010) (Journal of Geophysical Research, Vol. 115, A10224) attributing this to the local orientation of the magnetic field and the plasma flow preventing the waves to grow to levels detectable by the instruments on-board Cassini.

For the reason above, the detection of pickup ions signatures needs to be approached through other methods. For this study, we analyze data from the CAPS/IMS instrument on-board Cassini. IMS is an ion mass spectrometer capable of detecting ion fluxes with energies from 1 eV to 50 keV with an atomic resolution of M/ΔM ~ 70. During many of the dedicated Titan flybys by Cassini, IMS was able to distinguish between ions of magnetospheric origin and of ionospheric origin, the latter being freshly picked up ions from Titan's ionosphere. With the help of ion spectrograms and time of flight (TOF) information, we carried out a survey of all the flybys for which IMS has data (the CAPS instrument was switched off after the 83th. dedicated flyby, named in the project as T83) in order to obtain information about the location and frequency of occurence for the signatures.