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Detection of ozone on Saturn's satellites Rhea and Dione

Nature volume 388, pages 45–47 (1997)Cite this article

Abstract

The satellites Rhea and Dione orbit within the magnetosphere of Saturn, where they are exposed to particle irradiation from trapped ions. A similar situation applies to the galilean moons Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, which reside within Jupiter's radiation belts. All of these satellites have surfaces rich in water ice1,2. Laboratory studies of the interaction of charged-particle radiation with water ice predicted3 the tenuous oxygen atmospheres recently found on Europa4 and Ganymede5. However, theoretical investigations did not anticipate the trapping of significantly larger quantities of O2 within the surface ice6. The accumulation of detectable abundances of O3, produced by the action of ultraviolet or charged-particle radiation on O2, was also not predicted before being observed on Ganymede7. Here we report the identification of O3 in spectra of the saturnian satellites Rhea and Dione. The presence of trapped O3 is thus no longer unique to Ganymede, suggesting that special circumstances may not be required for its production.

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Figure 1: Geometric albedos of Rhea, Dione and Iapetus as a function of wavelength.
Figure 2: The predictions of a model including O3 (solid line), plotted with the spectrum of Rhea's leading (L) hemisphere (dotted curve).

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Acknowledgements

We thank M. J. Bartholomew for sharing her models of visible and IR satellite spectra on which our models of the UV spectrum are based. This work was supported by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Space Telescope Science Institute, 3700 San Martin Drive, Baltimore, 21218, Maryland, USA

    K. S. Noll

  2. NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, 94035, California, USA

    T. L. Roush, D. P. Cruikshank & Y. J. Pendleton

  3. Department of Geosciences, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, 94132, California, USA

    T. L. Roush

  4. University of Virginia, Engineering Physics, Charlottesville, 22901, Virginia, USA

    R. E. Johnson

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Noll, K., Roush, T., Cruikshank, D. et al. Detection of ozone on Saturn's satellites Rhea and Dione. Nature 388, 45–47 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1038/40348

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