Pickup ion Phase Space Distributions at the Moon and Titan

Details Pickup ion Phase Space Distributions at the Moon and Titan Pickup ion Phase Space Distributions at the Moon and Titan

May 2009

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2009agusm.p11a..03h&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Spring Meeting 2009, abstract #P11A-03

Other

2780 Solar Wind Interactions With Unmagnetized Bodies, 5421 Interactions With Particles And Fields, 6250 Moon (1221), 6275 Saturn, 6281 Titan

Scientific paper

The composition and structure of neutral exospheres imbedded in moving plasmas can be determined by measurements of the phase space distributions of pickup ions borne from the exospheres (1). An analytic model describing such relationships between neutral exospheres and their pickup ion progeny was recently developed for a one dimensional atmosphere imbedded in uniformly flowing background plasma with uniform magnetic fields (2). It was derived from the Vlasov equation with an ion source that explicitly accounts for the velocity and spatial variation of the exosphere source gases. The model was applied to the terrestrial moon and the Saturnian moon, Titan, interacting with the solar wind and Saturn's rotating magnetosphere, respectively. This work extends the model to include exosphere source gases in three dimensions (3D model) while retaining the uniform flow approximation. Consequently, more realistic comparisons between model and observations will be possible. One feature appearing in both models is the clear connection between the ratio of an ion gyroradius to an exosphere scale height: 1) when the ratio is less than one, the interaction is fluid like with all orbit phases of pickup ion cycloidal motion present at an observation point; 2) when the ratio is greater than one, the pickup ions appear as beams, where the phase space distribution peaks over a small velocity range at an observation site. The pickup ion model with a 3D exosphere not only yields more reliable ion velocity distributions, it also has the advantage of being able to describe the ion phase space distributions many gyroradii downstream from the exosphere source. This 3D model is applied to describe pickup ion phase space distributions borne from known neutral exosphere sources at the moon and Titan. Other ion exospheres such as Europa's are also considered. (1) R. E. Hartle and G. E. Thomas, J. Geophys. Res., 79, 1519, 1974. (2) R. E. Hartle and E. C. Sittler, J. Geophys. Res., 112, A07104, doi:10.1029/2006JA012157, 2007.

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