4.5 Article

Are Saturn's Interchange Injections Organized by Rotational Longitude?

Journal

JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH-SPACE PHYSICS
Volume 124, Issue 3, Pages 1806-1822

Publisher

AMER GEOPHYSICAL UNION
DOI: 10.1029/2018JA026196

Keywords

Saturn's magnetosphere; interchange injections; energetic particles; plasma transport; rotational modulation; statistics

Funding

  1. NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program [DGE 1256260]
  2. NASA [1415150]
  3. Jet Propulsion Laboratory
  4. NASA Cassini program through JPL [1243218]
  5. STFC [ST/N000749/1]
  6. Southwest Research Institute
  7. STFC [ST/N000749/1] Funding Source: UKRI

Ask authors/readers for more resources

Saturn's magnetosphere has been extensively studied over the past 13 years with the now retired Cassini mission. Periodic modulations in a variety of magnetospheric phenomena have been observed at periods close to those associated with the emission intensity of Saturn kilometric radiation (SKR). Resulting from Rayleigh-Taylor like plasma instabilities, interchange is believed to be the main plasma transport process in Saturn's inner to middle magnetosphere. Here we examine the organization of equatorially observed interchange events identified based on high-energy (3-22 keV) H+ intensifications by several longitude systems that have been derived from different types of measurements. The main question of interest here is as follows: Do interchange injections undergo periodicities similar to the Saturn kilometric radiation or other magnetospheric phenomena? We find that interchange shows enhanced occurrence rates in the northern longitude systems between 30 degrees and 120 degrees, particularly between 7 and 9 Saturn Radii. However, this modulation is small compared to the organization by local time. Additionally, this organization is weak and inconsistent with previous findings based on data with a limited time span.

Authors

I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.

Reviews

Primary Rating

4.5
Not enough ratings

Secondary Ratings

Novelty
-
Significance
-
Scientific rigor
-
Rate this paper

Recommended

No Data Available
No Data Available