INVESTIGADORES
BERTUCCI Cesar
congresos y reuniones científicas
Título:
Intrinsic magnetic Field of Titan Upper limit to the dipole moment
Autor/es:
WEI, H.; RUSSELL, C. T.; DOUGHERTY, M. K.; NEUBAUER, F. M.; BERTUCCI, C.; MA, Y. J.
Reunión:
Congreso; AGU Spring Meeting 2007; 2007
Resumen:
Titan is embedded in the Saturnian corotating magnetosphere with its
orbit lying in the equatorial plane at radius of 20 Saturn radii. The
interaction of Titan with this flowing magnetospheric plasma is complex
due to the time variation of external conditions and the physics of the
interaction with the neutral atmosphere and the ionosphere. A search
for any intrinsic magnetic field of Titan must be carried out at low
altitudes, where the complexities of the interaction are minimized.
Large scale magnetic fields are observed below Titan's ionopause and
these fields change both magnitude and orientation at low altitudes. The
variability of these fields suggests that external fields and
ionospheric currents contribute to the field seen at low altitudes, but
if the interior of Titan is electrically conducting the radial component
of the field should be least affected by them. Thus the radial component
of the magnetometer data between 1100 km and 950 km (periapsis) are
studied to determine how much of these fields may be due to an
intrinsic dipole moment. By combining data at polar regions and
equatorial regions, the dipole moments aligned in three Cartesian axes
(g10, g11, h11) are inverted from the data. Pass to pass consistencies
of the dipole moments allow us to estimate an upper limit of the
intrinsic field. The probable error of the mean of the g10 term is
sufficiently high that this value is consistent with zero, but the other
two components may be statistically different than zero. The upper limit
to the magnetic moment from these data is about 1.2 nT Rt 3.