PlanetarySeminar: Observations and Modelling of Saturn’s Magnetopause and Trapped Particle Dynamics

At 14:00 on Wednesday April 14th 2021, Prof. Nick Achilleos from UCL will be presenting a virtual seminar titled: “Observations and Modelling of Saturn’s Magnetopause and Trapped Particle Dynamics”. This seminar will be available via Teams.

Title: “Observations and Modelling of Saturn’s Magnetopause and Trapped
Particle Dynamics”

Abstract: “In this talk, I will summarise some of the important scientific topics being pursued at the moment by the UCL Planetary Plasmas group.

The first ‘strand’ will look at numerical modelling of the morphology of the magnetopause of the planet Saturn, and how we have applied that to studying the compressibility of Saturn’s magnetosphere. I will also describe recent observational work related to quantifying the heating of the electron population, in relation to the effects of the magnetic reconnection process at Saturn’s magnetopause.

In the second ‘strand’, I will describe work that our group has published related to the dynamics of trapped particles in the magnetospheric regions of Saturn (and Jupiter). We have been able to use concepts related to the motion of trapped particles to explain some properties of the high-energy particle population observed at Saturn, by the Cassini MIMI experiment; and to quantify the significant influence on the timescales of particle motion which is imposed by the non-dipolar (‘magnetodisc’) magnetic fields in these systems. This may have implications for future simulations of trapped particle dynamics at the orbits of Jupiter’s Galilean moons, for example.”