INVESTIGADORES
BERTUCCI Cesar
congresos y reuniones científicas
Título:
On the flowside plasma environment of Titan
Autor/es:
SZEGO, K.; BERTUCCI, C.; COATES, A. J.; BEBESI, Z.; ERDOS, G.; FOLDY, L.; YOUNG, D. T.; CRARY, F.; SITTLER, E. C.; HARTLE, R.; THOMSEN, M.
Reunión:
Congreso; AGU Fall Meeting 2006; 2006
Resumen:
We call the hemisphere of Titan centered on the corotation flow "the
flowside hemisphere", and the perturbed plasma region surrounding the
flowside ionosphere "the flowside plasma sphere" of Titan. Cassini
explored this region three times between 18 March - 21 July, 2006; twice
flying near the equatorial plane of Titan (T12 and T14), and once on a
polar orbit (T16). These flowside flybys are not very favorable for low
energy charged particle observations because the pointing of the
spacecraft prefers remote sensing observations, and the corotating ions
are outside the Cassini Plasma Spectrometer (CAPS). Despite this
limitation, the combined study of the electron, ion, and magnetic field
data has given new insights into the flowside plasma sphere. During
these flybys the magnetic field was not in a dipole configuration. The
perturbed plasma region both inbound and outbound extended to 6-7
R-Titan; its structure was not symmetric to the corotation direction.
The different major regions of the plasma sphere were reflected
simultaneously in the data we examined. Here we concentrate on the
deceleration region, pointing out that the deceleration of the heavy
and light ion components were different, leading to different bulk
speeds of the species. Hence the plasma interaction is dominantly
kinetic in this region.