Brightness of Saturnʹs rings with decreasing solar elevation

Early ground-based and spacecraft observations suggested that the temperature of Saturnʹs main rings (A, B and C) varied with the solar elevation angle, B ′ . Data from the composite infrared spectrometer (CIRS) on board Cassini, which has been in orbit around Saturn for more than five years, confirm this variation and have been used to derive the temperature of the main rings from a wide variety of geometries while B ′ varied from near − 24 ∘ to 0 ∘ (Saturnʹs equinox). an unresolved issue in fully explaining this variation relates to how the ring particles are organized and whether even a simple mono-layer or multi-layer approximation describes this best. We present a set of temperature data of the main rings of Saturn that cover the ∼ 23 ∘ —range of B ′ angles obtained with CIRS at low ( α ∼ 30 ∘ ) and high ( α ≥ 120 ∘ ) phase angles. We focus on particular regions of each ring with a radial extent ≤ 5000 km on their lit and unlit sides. In this broad range of B ′ , the data show that the A, B and C rings’ temperatures vary as much as 29–38, 22–34 and 18–23 K, respectively. Interestingly the unlit sides of the rings show important temperature variations with the decrease of B ′ as well. We introduce a simple analytical model based on the well known Froidevaux monolayer approximation and use the ring particles’ albedo as the only free parameter in order to fit and analyze this data and estimate the ring particleʹs albedo. The model considers that every particle of the ring behaves as a black body and warms up due to the direct energy coming from the Sun as well as the solar energy reflected from the atmosphere of Saturn and on its neighboring particles. Two types of shadowing functions are used. One analytical that is used in the latter model in the case of the three rings and another, numerical, that is applied in the case of the C ring alone. The model lit side albedo values at low phase are 0.59, 0.50 and 0.35–0.38 for the A, B and C rings, respectively.