Titans Plasma Environment during Cassinis T96 Flyby

S. BURNE; C. BERTUCCI

Congreso; AGU Fall Meeting; 2021

Titan -Saturns largest moon- transits its orbit just within the margins of the magnetosphere of its parent planet. Saturns magnetopause position is controlled by the solar wind pressure but also by the planets internal magnetospheric processes involving ionospheric currents and plasma from its moons and rings. With more than 120 close flybys between 2004 and 2017, the Cassini spacecraft characterized Titans plasma environment. Out of these, the so called T96 on December 1, 2013, stands out as the only flyby where Cassini found Titan in the supermagnetosonic and super-Alfvenic solar wind following the arrival of an ICME (Roussos et al., 2018). The formation of a collisionless bow shock and a Mars-like induced magnetosphere has been reported in previous works (Bertucci et al., 2015) but the complexity of the event left several issues unresolved. In this work we re-analyze Cassini MAG, MIMI and RPWS data to give a more complete description of Titans plasma environment around T96 based on the dynamics of Saturns magnetosphere and the properties of the ICME impacting the Kronian system. In particular, a more accurate estimation of the solar wind speed upstream from Titan allows the characterization of supercritical substructures within Titans bow shock as well as a more realistic analysis on the presence of fossil interplanetary magnetic fields within Titans induced magnetosphere.