Galileo In-Situ Dust Measurements in Jupiter's Gossamer Rings

TL;DR

The Galileo spacecraft's in-situ dust measurements in Jupiter's gossamer rings revealed a detailed size distribution of tiny particles, extending previous optical findings and showing variations in particle flux and orbital inclinations.

Contribution

First in-situ measurements of dust in Jupiter's gossamer rings, extending size distribution data to smaller particles and comparing results with optical imaging.

Findings

Size distribution increases towards smaller particles.

Detected particles on highly-tilted orbits up to 20 degrees.

Large particles (~5 micron) dominate optical cross-section.

Abstract

During its late orbital mission at Jupiter the Galileo spacecraft made two passages through the giant planet's gossamer ring system. The impact-ionization dust detector on board successfully recorded dust impacts during both ring passages and provided the first in-situ measurements from a dusty planetary ring. In all, a few thousand dust impacts were counted with the instrument accumulators during both ring passages, but only a total of 110 complete data sets of dust impacts were transmitted to Earth. Detected particle sizes range from about 0.2 to 5 micron, extending the known size distribution by an order of magnitude towards smaller particles than previously derived from optical imaging (Showalter et al. 2008). The grain size distribution increases towards smaller particles and shows an excess of these tiny motes in the Amalthea gossamer ring compared to the Thebe ring. The size distribution for the Amalthea ring derived from our in-situ measurements for the small grains agrees very well with the one obtained from images for large grains. Our analysis shows that particles contributing most to the optical cross-section are about 5 micron in radius, in agreement with imaging results. The measurements indicate a large drop in particle flux immediately interior to Thebe's orbit and some detected particles seem to be on highly-tilted orbits with inclinations up to 20 deg.