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  • Presentation | P34B: Planetary Ring, Meteoroid, and Dust Populations and Effects II Oral
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  • P34B-03: Stellar Occultation Diffraction as a Probe of Edge Structure in Saturn’s Narrow, Eccentric Ringlets
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Author(s):
Stephanie Eckert, Florida Polytechnic University (First Author, Presenting Author)
Joshua Colwell, University of Central Florida
Richard Jerousek, University of Central Florida
Tracy Becker, Southwest Research Institute
Larry Esposito, University of Colorado at Boulder


NASA’s Cassini mission studied Saturn’s rings using a variety of instruments, including the Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph (UVIS) which observed stars as they passed behind the rings—a method called stellar occultation. These observations can reveal fine-scale features such as brief signal spikes caused by tiny ring particles diffracting starlight. These diffraction signatures offer clues about the sizes of the smallest particles, which influence the structure and dynamics of the rings. We searched for these signatures at the edges of several narrow ringlets using data from UVIS. We find that most detections occur when the ringlets are near periapsis, the point in their orbit where particle orbits are most compressed, suggesting that edge sharpness and small particle distributions vary with orbital position.



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