Laboratory Studies of Ice-Particle Collisions in Saturn'sDense Rings

摘要

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 0 cm s~(-1) (at the beginning) to 0.35 cm s~(-1) (after 9 s of experiment duration), can be explained by a constant coefficient of restitution ε = 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~(-1), and thus will very well simulate the conditions in Saturn's main rings.