IOPW Aurora/Torus-Magnetosphere sub-Discipline

Update Oct 2012

   The concentration of effort in the past year has been at Saturn,
in no small part owing to the continuing Cassini mission.  

   The status of the discipline was reported at the July 2011
Magnetospheres of the Outer Planets conference, held at Boston
University (http://www.bu.edu/csp/mop2011/).  There have been 
few observations of the plasma torus in the past year, and only
scattered observations of Jupiter's aurora, mainly using HST and
ground-based IR telescopes.  

   By contrast, an HST program to detect aurora on Uranus was 
successful, for the first time since the Voyager 2 flyby in 1986!
(Lamy et al. 2012).  This program attempted to trace a disturbance
in the solar wind from 1 AU out to Uranus, and the HST orbits
were schedule to bracket the expected arrival time.  Whether this
worked or not, auroral emissions were clearly detected on one day,
and weakly detected at other times.  A new HST program has been
awarded in the present cycle to follow up on these observations.

   At Saturn, further coordinated HST and Cassini UVIS and VIMS 
observations are scheduled, and these programs have been very
successful to date.  In the first years of Cassini at Saturn,
there were few UV/IR observations of the aurora, but the number
has been increasing over the years, and is now a common mode
for Cassini.  The lead people are Jon Nichols for the HST, Wayne
Pryor for UVIS, and Tom Stallard for VIMS.  The detection of 
auroral emission from the magnetic footprint of Enceladus at
Saturn was a big event in the prior year.  

A Few Publications (you can find links to specific papers under the publications menu tab):

“Discovery of the Enceladus Auroral Footprint at Saturn”, W. Pryor, 
A.B. Rymer et al., Nature, 472, 331-333, doi:10.1038/nature09928 
(2011).  

“Auroral Evidence of Io’s Control over the Magnetosphere of 
Jupiter”, B. Bonfond, D. Grodent, J.-C. Gérard, T. Stallard, 
J.T. Clarke, M. Yoneda, A. Radioti, and J. Gustin, Geophys. 
Res. Lett., 39, L01105, doi:10.1029/2011GL050253 (2012).  

“Earth-based detection of Uranus’ aurorae”, L. Lamy et al., 
Geophys. Res. Lett., 39, L07105, doi:10.1029/2012GL051312 (2012).