Laboratory studies of ice-particle collisions in Saturn's dense rings

TL;DR

This study uses microgravity experiments with glass spheres to simulate ice-particle collisions in Saturn's dense rings, revealing energy dissipation dynamics and informing future cryogenic experiments.

Contribution

It introduces a new experimental method to study many-body ice-particle collisions and provides data on energy dissipation relevant to Saturn's rings.

Findings

Mean particle velocity decreases from ~10 cm/s to ~0.35 cm/s over 9 seconds.

Coefficient of restitution is approximately 0.64 for the studied collisions.

Future cryogenic experiments can simulate Saturn's ring conditions at lower velocities.

Abstract

In this work, we report on microgravity studies of particle ensembles simulating ice-particle collisions in Saturn's dense main rings. We have developed an experimental method to study the energy dissipation in a many-body system consisting of approx. one hundred cm-sized glass spheres. The temporal development of the mean particle velocity, ranging from ~10 cm/s (at the beginning) to ~0.35 cm/s (after 9s of experiment duration), can be explained by a constant coefficient of restitution of 0.64. A comparison to values obtained for pure water-ice bodies shows that future cryogenic ice-collision experiments can achieve collision velocities of ~0.1 cm/s, and thus will very well simulate the conditions in Saturn's main rings.