Mars and Venus ion cyclotron waves and their implications

Details Mars and Venus ion cyclotron waves and their implications Mars and Venus ion cyclotron waves and their implications

May 2009

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2009agusm.p33b..07w&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Spring Meeting 2009, abstract #P33B-07

Physics

2152 Pickup Ions, 2471 Plasma Waves And Instabilities (2772), 2780 Solar Wind Interactions With Unmagnetized Bodies, 6225 Mars, 6295 Venus

Scientific paper

Mars and Venus do not have appreciable global magnetic fields to shield their neutral atmospheres from erosion by the solar wind. When their atmospheric hydrogen atoms are ionized and picked up by the solar wind, proton cyclotron waves are created from the free energy of the ring-beam distribution of the pick-up ions. At Mars, proton cyclotron waves observed by Mars Global Surveyor extend from the magnetosheath to over 12 Mars radii, with intermittent occurrence and amplitudes slowly varying with distance. The wave occurrence pattern indicates that the Martian hydrogen exosphere cannot be spherically symmetric but is rather disk- shaped with asymmetry in the direction of the interplanetary electric field. In order to travel across the magnetic field the picked up ions must be neutralized near where they are picked up and these fast neutrals are transported to distant regions where they get re-ionized and produce waves far downstream. Thus the top of Mars exosphere appears to extend in a disk to high altitude, with its orientation controlled by the interplanetary magnetic field. At Venus, proton cyclotron waves were first observed in the magnetosheath by Pioneer Venus Orbiter and later in the solar wind around Venus by Venus Express at a distance as far as 7 Venus radii. This paper compares the properties of the Mars and Venus waves and discusses the implication of these observations.

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