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Artist Concept of Particle Population in Saturn's Magnetosphere
This is an artist's concept of the Saturnian plasma sheet based on data
from Cassini magnetospheric imaging instrument. It shows Saturn's embedded
"ring current," an invisible ring of energetic ions trapped in the
planet's magnetic field.
Saturn is at the center, with the red "donut" representing the
distribution of dense neutral gas outside Saturn's icy rings. Beyond this
region, energetic ions populate the plasma sheet to the dayside
magnetopause filling the faintly sketched magnetic flux tubes to higher
latitudes and contributing to the ring current. The plasma sheet thins
gradually toward the nightside. The view is from above Saturn's equatorial
plane, which is represented by grid lines. The moon Titan's location is
shown for scale. The location of the bow shock is marked, as is the flow
of the deflected solar wind in the magnetosheath.
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 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/home/index.cfm and the instrument
team's home page, http://sd-www.jhuapl.edu/CASSINI/index.html.
