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The icy moons

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Abstract

For Principal Investigator Michele Dougherty of the Magnetometer (MAG) team, the Cassini mission highlight occurred in February 2005. This was when she and her colleagues determined that Saturn’s magnetic field lines were unexpectedly bending as they went by the satellite Enceladus. This was possibly a sign that the tiny moon, even with its low gravity, had a localized, electrically conducting atmosphere. Not sure that her data was correct, Dougherty lobbied mission management for a closer Enceladus flyby than was planned, hoping to take some definitive measurements.

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Meltzer, M. (2015). The icy moons. In: The Cassini-Huygens Visit to Saturn. Springer Praxis Books(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07608-9_13

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