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PIA06420: Saturn's Main Radiation Belt
Target Name: Titan
Is a satellite of: Saturn
Mission: Cassini-Huygens
Spacecraft: Cassini Orbiter
Instrument: Magnetospheric Imaging Instrument
Product Size: 720 samples x 540 lines
Produced By: Johns Hopkins University
Primary Data Set: Cassini
Full-Res TIFF: PIA06420.tif (405.4 kB)
Full-Res JPEG: PIA06420.jpg (34.6 kB)

Click on the image to download a moderately sized image in JPEG format (possibly reduced in size from original).

Original Caption Released with Image:

This graph shows the energetic ion and electron data from the Saturn orbit insertion interval on June 30 and July 1, 2004. Ion intensity is shown above the horizontal divider as energy increasing upward. Electron intensity is shown below the horizontal divider as energy increasing downward, as measured by the magnetospheric imaging instrument's low energy magnetospheric measurement system sensor onboard the Cassini spacecraft. Red indicates high particle intensity, blue is low intensity. The vertical energy scales run from 30 kilo-electron volts to several mega-electron volts. Time runs from left to right, with approximately 36 hours of data shown, covering a distance range from Saturn's center between 783,000 kilometers (487,000 miles) at either end, down to about 78,000 (49,000 miles) at closest approach.

The region above the rings was found to be devoid of ions and electrons; the region inside the D-ring inner edge was not directly sampled and absent the magnetospheric imaging instrument ion and neutral camera remote sensing would have been assumed empty of energetic particles.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter was designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The magnetospheric imaging instrument was designed, built and is operated by an international team lead by the Applied Physics Laboratory of the Johns Hopkins University, Laurel, Md.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission, visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the instrument team's home page, http://sd-www.jhuapl.edu/CASSINI/index.html.


Image Credit:
NASA/JPL/APL


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