Magnetic reconnection at the magnetopause (MP) energises ambient plasma via the< release of magnetic energy and produces an “open” magnetosphere allowing solar wind particles to directly enter the system. At Saturn, the nature of MP reconnection remains unclear. The current study examines electron bulk heating at MP crossings, in order to probe the relationship between observed and predicted reconnection heating proposed by Phan et al. (2013) under open and closed MP, and how this may pertain to the position of the crossings in the Δβ-magnetic shear parameter space. The electron heating for 70 MP crossings made by the Cassini spacecraft from April 2005 to July 2007 was found using 1d and 3d moment methods. Minimum variance analysis was used on the magnetic field data to help indicate whether the MP is open or closed. We found better agreement between observed and predicted heating for events suggestive of locally ‘open’ MP. For events suggestive of locally ‘closed’ MP, we observed a cluster of points consistent with no electron heating, but also numerous cases with significant heating. Examining the events in the Δβ-magnetic shear parameter space, we find 83% of events without evidence of energisation were situated in the ‘reconnection suppressed’ regime, whilst between 43% to 68% of events with energisation lie in the ‘reconnection possible’ regime depending on the threshold used. The discrepancies could be explained by a combination of spatial and temporal variability which makes it possible to observe heated electrons with different conditions from the putative reconnection site.

Solar wind electrons play an important role in the energy balance of the solar wind acceleration by carrying energy into interplanetary space in the form of electron heat flux. The heat flux is stored in the complex electron velocity distribution functions (VDFs) shaped by expansion, Coulomb collisions, and field-particle interactions. We investigate how the suprathermal electron deficit in the anti-strahl direction, which was recently discovered in the near-Sun solar wind, drives a kinetic instability and creates whistler waves with wave vectors that are quasi-parallel to the direction of the background magnetic field. We combined high-cadence measurements of electron pitch-angle distribution functions and electromagnetic waves provided by Solar Orbiter during its first orbit. Our case study is based on a burst-mode data interval from the Electrostatic Analyser System (SWA-EAS) at a distance of 112 RS (0.52 au) from the Sun, during which several whistler wave packets were detected by Solar Orbiter’s Radio and Plasma Waves (RPW) instrument. The sunward deficit creates kinetic conditions under which the quasi-parallel whistler wave becomes unstable. We directly test our predictions for the existence of these waves through solar wind observations. We find whistler waves that are quasi-parallel and almost circularly polarised, propagating away from the Sun, coinciding with a pronounced sunward deficit in the electron VDF. The cyclotron-resonance condition is fulfilled for electrons moving in the direction opposite to the direction of wave propagation, with energies corresponding to those associated with the sunward deficit. The quasilinear diffusion of the resonant electrons tends to fill the deficit, leading to a reduction in the total electron heat flux.