Energetic charged particle kinematics in Saturn's inner magnetosphere

Viac o knihe

Plasma circulation in the Saturnian magnetosphere, particularly its inner region, was not fully understood before this research. The arrival of Cassini confirmed that the magnetospheric plasma is primarily driven by rotation, which initially hindered the identification of convection patterns using direct velocity measurements. This thesis introduces a novel method to detect potential convection patterns in the inner Saturnian magnetosphere, focusing on the influence of icy moons on energetic electrons, termed energetic electron microsignatures. The study examines the radial displacement of dropout events from their predicted locations, which can be estimated by overlooking non-corotation convection effects. This approach led to the identification of a convective pattern associated with dawnward flows of several km/s in Saturn's inner magnetosphere, corroborated by independent studies and plasma radial velocity measurements. A significant advantage of this method is that the observed offset reflects radial flows across all local times the microsignature encountered before detection, facilitating the inference of global circulation properties from single events. The expanding microsignature dataset serves as a valuable resource for uncovering additional properties of the electric field and its unknown origin. This convection inference method can also be applied to the magnetospheres of other outer planets, proving useful for fut