E ring dust sources: Implications from Cassini's dust measurements

The Enceladus flybys of the Cassini spacecraft are changing our understanding of the origin and sustainment of Saturn's E ring. Surprisingly, beyond the widely accepted dust production caused by micrometeoroid impacts onto the atmosphereless satellites (the impactor-ejecta process), geophysical activities have been detected at the south pole of Enceladus, providing an additional, efficient dust source. The dust detector data obtained during the flyby E11 are used to identify the amount of dust produced in the impactor-ejecta process and to improve related modeling [Spahn, F., Schmidt, J., Albers, N., Hörning, M., Makuch, M., Seiß, M., Kempf, S., Srama, R., Dikarev, V.V., Helfert, S., Moragas-Klostermeyer, G., Krivov, A.V., Sremčević, M., Tuzzolino, A., Economou, T., Grün, E., 2006. Cassini dust measurements at Enceladus: implications for Saturn's E ring. Science, in press]. With this, we estimate the impact-generated dust contributions of the other E ring satellites and find significant differences in the dust ejection efficiency by two projectile families—the E ring particles (ERPs) and the interplanetary dust particles (IDPs). Together with the Enceladus south-pole source, the ERP impacts play a crucial role in the inner region, whereas the IDP impacts dominate the particle production in the outer E ring, possibly accounting for its large radial extent. Our results can be verified in future Cassini flybys of the E ring satellites. In this way poorly known parameters of the dust particle production in hypervelocity impacts can be constrained by comparison of the data and theory.