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Remote sensing of plasma flows in Saturn’s magnetosphere using ENA imagery

Activity: Talk or presentation typesOral presentation

11/07/2024

Energetic neutral atom (ENA) imagery reveals the dynamics of magnetospheric ions, with ENAs emitted from regions of ongoing ion-neutral charge exchange. At Saturn, the ENA emissions typically reveal discrete ion populations that sub-corotate about the planet, activated by global-scale injection events following tail reconnection. Additionally, the ENAs display planetary-period modulation over longer time periods (e.g., Mitchell+ 2009, Kinrade, Bader+ 2021). The key to decoupling and understanding these periodicities amidst transient injection features is better tracking of moving features in the Cassini INCA imagery. Keograms have been used to extrapolate the plasma flow speed from ENA images (e.g., Carbary & Mitchell, 2014) but the construction of azimuthal emission profiles requires averaging over radial distance, and information about the inward motion of the plasma is partially lost. Here we apply Voronoi segmentation (e.g., Guio & Achilleos, 2009) to ENA image projections (Bader, Kinrade+ 2021), whereby an image is divided into random segments and then recursively merged or split, cell-by-cell, depending on neighbouring cell intensity distributions. The segmentation process thereby hones in on the visible ENA emission morphology at each time step, producing a seed cloud that can be used to trace the motion of ENA features. The final Voronoi segmentation also provides a distribution of inherent scale sizes, allowing us to characterise the evolution of the ion population under gradient-curvature drift. We present azimuthal and radial drift speeds of ENA injection signatures derived from Voronoi segmentation, and compare them to similar estimates obtained from keogram analysis and in situ particle surveys.

Event (Conference)

TitleMagnetospheres of the Outer Planets 2024
Abbreviated titleMOP2024
Date8/07/2412/07/24
Website
LocationUniversity of Minnesota
CityMinneapolis
Country/TerritoryUnited States
Degree of recognitionInternational event