This licentiate thesis presents our investigation of Saturn's inner plasma disk. The thesis gives an overview of the Cassini-Huygens project, what a plasma is and how we use the Langmuir probe to investigate it, various difficulties related to the measurements, the structure of the magnetosphere of Saturn, with special focus on the inner magnetosphere and the region around the Saturnian moon Enceladus. For our investigation we use the Cassini Langmuir probe to derive ion density and ion velocity in the region from 2.5 to 12 Saturn radii. We show that the dominant part of the plasma torus, ion density above ~15 particle/cm3, is located in between 2.5 and 8 Saturn radii (1 RS = 60,268 km) from the planet, with a north-southward extension of <img src="http://www.diva-portal.org/cgi-bin/mimetex.cgi?%5Cpm" />2 RS. The plume of the moon Enceladus is clearly visible as an ion density maximum of 105 cm-3, only present at the south side of the ring plane, as expected since the Enceladus plumes are located in the south polar region. Also the azimuthal ion velocity vi,Θ is estimated, showing a clear general trend in the region between 3 and 7 RS, described by vi,Θ =1.5R2-8.7R+39. The average vi,Θ starts to deviate from corotation speed at around 3 RS and reaches down to ~68 % of corotation close to 5 RS. The Langmuir probe data show a clear day/night side asymmetry in both ion density and ion velocity, most prominent in the radial region 4-6 RS from the center of Saturn. The ion densities ni varies from an average of ~35 cm-3 for the lowest dayside values close to noon up to ~70 cm-3 for the highest nightside values around midnight. The azimuthal ion velocities vi,Θ varies from ~28-32 km/s at the lowest dayside values around noon to ~36-40 km/s at the highest nightside values around midnight. This gives an azimuthal ion velocity difference between noon and midnight of Δvi,Θ ~5-10 km/s. The day/night asymmetry is suggested to be due to dust-plasma interaction.

This thesis presents a study of the inner plasma disk of Saturn. The results are derived from measurements by the instruments on board the Cassini spacecraft, mainly the Cassini Langmuir probe (LP), which has been in orbit around Saturn since 2004. One of the great discoveries of the Cassini spacecraft is that the Saturnian moon Enceladus, located at 3.95 Saturn radii (1 RS = 60,268 km), constantly expels water vapor and condensed water from ridges and troughs located in its south polar region. Impact ionization and photoionization of the water molecules, and subsequent transport, creates a plasma disk around the orbit of Enceladus. The plasma disk ion components are mainly hydrogen ions H+ and water group ions W+ (O+, OH+, H2O+, and H3O+). The Cassini LP is used to measure the properties of the plasma. A new method to derive ion density and ion velocity from Langmuir probe measurements has been developed. The estimated LP statistics are used to derive the extension of the plasma disk, which show plasma densities above ~20 cm-3 in between 2.7 and 8.8 RS. The densities also show a very variable plasma disk, varying with one order of magnitude at the inner part of the disk. We show that the density variation could partly be explained by a dayside/nightside asymmetry in both equatorial ion densities and azimuthal ion velocities. The asymmetry is suggested to be due to the particle orbits being shifted towards the Sun that in turn would cause the whole plasma disk to be shifted. We also investigate the ion loss processes of the inner plasma disk and conclude that loss by transport dominates loss by recombination in the entire region. However, loss by recombination is still important in the region closest to Enceladus (~±0.5 RS) where it differs with only a factor of two from ion transport loss.