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.
@article{arxiv.0904.4833,
title = {Laboratory studies of ice-particle collisions in Saturn's dense rings},
author = {Daniel Heißelmann and Jürgen Blum and Kristin Wolling},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0904.4833},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
Accepted by "Proc. Powders and Grains 2009", Publisher AIP