Mass composition of the escaping plasma at Mars

Details Mass composition of the escaping plasma at Mars Mass composition of the escaping plasma at Mars

Jun 2006

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2006icar..182..320c&link_type=abstract

Icarus, Volume 182, Issue 2, p. 320-328.

Computer Science

36

Scientific paper

Data from the Ion Mass Analyzer (IMA) sensor of the ASPERA-3 instrument suite on Mars Express have been analyzed to determine the mass composition of the escaping ion species at Mars. We have examined 77 different ion-beam events and we present the results in terms of flux ratios between the following ion species: CO+2/O+ and O+2/O+. The following ratios averaged over all events and energies were identified: CO+2/O+ = 0.2 and O+2/O+ = 0.9. The values measured are significantly higher, by a factor of 10 for O+2/O+, than a contemporary modeled ratio for the maximum fluxes which the martian ionosphere can supply. The most abundant ion species was found to be O+, followed by O+2 and CO+2. We estimate the loss of CO+2 to be 4.0×10s(0.29 kgs) by using the previous measurements of Phobos-2 in our calculations. The dependence of the ion ratios in relation to their energy ranges we studied, 0.3 3.0 keV, indicated that no clear correlation was found.

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