Large mass inflow rates in Saturn’s rings due to ballistic transport and mass loading

Abstract

The Cassini mission provided key measurements needed to determine the absolute age of Saturn’s rings, including the extrinsic micrometeoroid flux at Saturn, the volume fraction of non-icy pollutants in the rings, and the total ring mass. These three factors constrain the ring age to be no more than a few 100 Myr (Kempf et al., 2022). Observations during the Cassini Grand Finale also showed that the rings are losing mass to the planet at a prodigious rate. Some of the mass flux falls as “ring rain” at high latitudes. However, the influx in ring rain is considerably less than the total measured mass influx of 4800 to 45000 kg s−1 at lower latitudes (Waite et al., 2018).In addition to polluting the rings, micrometeoroid impacts lead to ballistic transport, the mass and angular momentum transport due to net exchanges of meteoroid impact ejecta. Because the ejecta are predominantly prograde, they carry net angular momentum outward. As a result, ring material drifts inward toward the planet. Here, for the first time, we use a simple model to quantify this radial mass inflow rate for dense rings and find that, for plausible choices of parameters, ballistic transport and mass loading by meteoroids can produce a total inward flux of material in the inner B ring and in the C ring that is on the order of a few ⋅103 to a few ⋅104 kg s−1, in agreement with measurements during the Cassini Grand Finale. From these mass inflow rates, we estimate that the remaining ring lifetime is ∼ 15 to 400 Myr. Combining this with a revised pollution age of ∼ 120 Myr, we conclude that Saturn’s rings are not only young but ephemeral and probably started their evolution on a similar timescale to their pollution age with an initial mass of one to a few Mimas masses.In addition to showing that meteoroid impacts can produce a large sustained mass inflow through the B and C rings, this paper addresses various uncertainties and considers possible contributions by additional transport mechanisms and by external torques. We also map out a set of future research projects, including global simulations.