Particle Sizes and Self Gravity Wakes in Saturn’s A Ring

Abstract:

The Cassini Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph (UVIS) and Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) have measured normal optical depths throughout Saturn’s rings by stellar occultations covering a wide range of viewing geometries. The UVIS photometer has an effective wavelength of 0.15 µm and a relatively wide (6.0 mrad × 6.4 mrad) field-of-view. VIMS, in occultation mode, measures at an effective wavelength of 2.9 µm and over a single pixel of angular dimensions 0.25 mrad × 0.5 mrad. Occultations measured by VIMS at the same viewing geometry as UVIS occultations overstate the optical depth if particles smaller than 1.22λ_VIMS/2θ ~ 8.36 mm are present because light diffracted out of the VIMS pixel by those particles is not replaced by neighboring particles. By measuring differential optical depths one can probe the parameters of the ring particle size distribution (i.e. Zebker et al. 1985, Icarus, 64, 531-548). The technique is complicated, however, by the geometric dependence of the optical depth imposed by the non-axisymmetric self-gravity wakes, which are ephemeral elongated aggregates, deformed by Keplerian shear. Beginning with the granola bar wake model of Colwell et al. (2006, Geophys. Res. Lett., 33, L07201), we introduce a free parameter τ_small which represents the excess normal optical depth measured by VIMS due to sub-cm particles between the opaque wakes and combine VIMS and UVIS occultations for particle size analysis while simultaneously determining the properties of the wakes. We find that throughout the A Ring the wake properties generally agree with previously published results (Colwell et al. 2006, Hedman et al. 2007, Astron. J., 133, 2624-2629). We find a significant fraction of sub-cm particles in the inner and outer A Ring and in the troughs of density waves near strong Lindblad resonances. While wake properties vary in the halo regions surrounding these resonances, the abundance of sub-cm particles varies little from 124,000-131,000 km. In the region exterior to the Encke gap we find that the size of the smallest particles in the ring decreases toward the outer edge of the ring. We also find a trend of increasing sub-cm particle abundance toward the outer edge of the A Ring, consistent with previous studies and suggestive of greater erosion of ring particles due to numerous density waves in that region.