29-30 August 2007 Icy Satellites (rev 49), Last stop on the road to Iapetus Options

[Exploitcorporati...]

CICLOPS' Rev 49 Looking Ahead page is up. Highlights include a fourth monthy Voyager-class encounter with Tethys with 500m resolution over Odysseus (finally!)
Detailed mosaics of Rhea's prominent ray crater and points west are on tap for Old Scabby's second closeup. This should be a really cool periapsis passage to tide us over until the 10th of September.

[DrShank]

i have to admit im short in the theory department. im only interested if they land someplace!
this all goes back to shoemaker-levy 9 days, now almost 15 years ago. breakup requires passage within about 1.5 jupiter radii of the surface of the planet, and something similar for saturn, except the density plays in somehow. the articles by asphaug, benz and others back in the mid-1990s tell all, otherwise start with the Schenk paper in Icarus in 1996 which includes such references. i dont have a copy with me at the moment, alas!
cheers,
paul

[ngunn]

i have to admit im short in the theory department. im only interested if they land someplace!

Well, I'm sure this is obvious to you but for others who may be interested I'll just expand on the point I made in my last post.

Any comet which is going to collide with one of Saturn's inner moons after being disrupted at Saturn has to have been orbiting pretty close to the ring plane in the first place. That particular subset of comets is precisely the one with the biggest chance of a lengthy and damaging encounter with the rings. Saturn's low density means that its surface is further out than the radius at which the gradient of it's gravitational field is deemed sufficient to disrupt a comet (based on certain assumptions about the material strength of comets). I suggest that an encounter with the rings presents a viable alternative mechanism whereby a comet in the right kind of orbit could be disrupted and then form a crater chain, streak or whatever on an icy moon.

In fact it could well be that for the special case of comets orbiting in their respective planet's equatorial plane Saturn (plus rings) is better at disrupting them than Jupiter.