Quantifying the stress of the Saturnian magnetosphere during the Cassini era

What is it about?

The Cassini spacecraft orbited the planet Saturn for 13 years before plummeting into its atmosphere in September 2017. The mission provided a rich dataset that was collected by the onboard instruments, uncovering many characteristics of the planetary environment. Now the mission is complete, we have a unique opportunity to quantify this behaviour over a significant period of time. This work will use the complete magnetometer dataset to track the size of the magnetic environment that surrounds Saturn, called its magnetosphere. Due to processes both within and outside of this cavity, the size of the magnetosphere changes constantly. The question this analysis will answer is whether this change is steady over this extended interval, which amounts to almost half a Saturn year. Our results show that the size of the magnetosphere did not vary for a significant duration of this era, but that large scale changes were observed, where the field was sufficiently stretched or compressed.

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Why is it important?

These results have implications for the broader study of giant magnetospheres, which are found both within and outside of our solar system. They also reveal how dynamic the magnetosphere of Saturn is compared to the magnetosphere of Earth, improving our understanding of the terrestrial environment.