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

Daniel Heißelmann; Jürgen Blum; Kristin Wolling

doi:10.1063/1.3180045

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arXiv · 0904.4833

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

Daniel Heißelmann·Jürgen Blum·Kristin Wolling

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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.

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Daniel Heißelmann, Jürgen Blum, Kristin Wolling. 2009-04-30. Laboratory studies of ice-particle collisions in Saturn's dense rings. https://doi.org/10.1063/1.3180045

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