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The Smallest Particles in Saturn's A and C Rings

Radio occultations of Saturn's main rings by spacecraft suggest a power law particle size-distribution down to sizes of the order of 1 cm (Marouf et al., 1983), (Zebker et al., 1985). The lack of optical depth variations between ultraviolet and near-IR wavelengths indicate a lack of micron-sized particles. Between these two regimes, the particle-size distribution is largely unknown. A cutoff where the particle-size distribution turns over must exist, but the position and shape of it is not clear from existing studies. Using a series of solar occultations performed by the VIMS instrument on-board Cassini in the near-infrared, we are able to measure light forward scattered by particles in the A and C rings. With a model of diffraction by ring particles, and the previous radio work as a constraint on the slope of the particle size distribution, we estimate the minimum particle size using a truncated power-law size distribution. The C Ring shows a minimum particle size of $4.1^{+3.8}_{-1.3}$ mm, with an assumed power law index of q=3.1 and a maximum particle size of 10 m. The A Ring signal shows a similar level of scattered flux, but modeling is complicated by the presence of self-gravity wakes and higher optical depths. If q<3, our A Ring model requires a minimum particle size below one millimeter (< 0.34 mm for an assumed q=2.75, or $0.56^{+0.35}_{-0.16}$ mm for a steeper q=2.9) to be consistent with VIMS observations. These results might seem to contradict previous optical(Dones et al., 1993) and infrared (French and Nicholson, 2000) work, which implied that there were few particles in the A Ring smaller than 1 cm. But, because of the shallow power law, relatively little optical depth (between 0.03 and 0.16 in extinction, or 0.015 - 0.08 in absorption) is provided by these particles.