Titan's near magnetotail from magnetic field and electron plasma observations and modeling: Cassini flybys TA, TB, and T3

Abstract

The first close Titan encounters TA, TB, and T3 of the Cassini mission at almost the same Saturnian local time ∼1030 and in the same spatial region downstream of Titan have enabled us to study the formation of the tail of its induced magnetosphere. The study is based on magnetic field and electron plasma observations as well as three‐dimensional modeling. Our most important findings are the following: (1) No crossings of a bow shock of Titan were observed, and all encounters occurred at high plasma β > 1 for transsonic and trans‐Alfvénic Mach numbers. (2) The magnetic draping signature of the induced magnetosphere often shows a sharp outer boundary called the draping boundary (DB) in the near‐tail region. (3) The DB is often occurring as a discontinuity in magnetic field spatial derivatives, and therefore the DB is a discontinuity in the spatial distribution of plasma currents. (4) Perpendicular to the incident flow direction the DB shows an approximately elliptic cross section elongated along the incident magnetic field direction and a displacement toward the Sun. (5) We argue that the DB in the magnetic tail region corresponds to the boundary of a structure which is analogous to an Alfvén wing at very small β and in our case of larger β contains Alfvénic and slow mode features. It forms a tail like a delta wing in aerodynamics. (6) For the two less disturbed flybys, TA and T3, a polarity reversal layer has been observed with thicknesses of ∼320 km and ∼230 km, respectively.