Plasma-ion Induced Sputtering and Heating of Titan's Atmosphere

Details Plasma-ion Induced Sputtering and Heating of Titan's Atmosphere Plasma-ion Induced Sputtering and Heating of Titan's Atmosphere

May 2007

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2007agusm.p44a..04j&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Spring Meeting 2007, abstract #P44A-04

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

5405 Atmospheres (0343, 1060), 5780 Tori And Exospheres, 6281 Titan

Scientific paper

Titan is unique among the outer solar system icy satellites in having an atmosphere with a column density about ten times that of the Earth's atmosphere and an atmospheric mass to solid mass ratio comparable to that of Venus. Atmospheres equivalent in size to that at Titan would have been removed from the icy Galilean satellites by the plasma trapped in the Jovian magnetosphere (Johnson 2004). Therefore, the use of Cassini data to determine the present erosion rate of Titan's atmosphere provides an important end point for studying the erosion and heating of planetary and satellite atmospheres by an ambient plasma. In this paper we describe the deposition of energy, the erosion and the expansion of the upper atmosphere of Titan using Direct Simulation Monte Carlo models (Shematovich et al. 2003; Michael et al. 2005; Michael and Johnson 2005). These calculations are used to calibrate semi-empirical models of atmospheric sputtering (Johnson 1994) that are used to interpret Cassini data at Titan. Using a number of plasma conditions, the temperature and density vs. altitude above the exobase and the rate of escape are calculated. References: Johnson, R.E. "Plasma-induced Sputtering of an Atmosphere" in Space Science Reviews 69 215-253 (1994). Johnson. R.E., " The magnetospheric plasmadriven evolution of satellite atmospheres" Astrophys. J. 609, L99-L102 (2004). Michael, M. and R.E. Johnson, "Energy deposition of pickup ions and heating of Titan's atmosphere", Planetary & Space Sci.53, 1510-1514 (2005). Michael M., R.E. Johnson, F. Leblanc, M. Liu, J.G. Luhmann, and V.I. Shematovich, "Ejection of nitrogen from Titan's atmosphere by magnetospheric ions and pick-up ions", Icarus 175, 263-267 (2005). Shematovich, V.I., R.E. Johnson, M. Michael, and J.G. Luhmann, "Nitrogen loss from Titan", JGR 108, No. E8, 5087, doi:10.1029/2003JE002094 (2003).

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