Multispecies Hybrid Simulations of Titan's Plasma Interaction

Details Multispecies Hybrid Simulations of Titan's Plasma Interaction Multispecies Hybrid Simulations of Titan's Plasma Interaction

May 2004

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2004agusmsm51b..03l&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Spring Meeting 2004, abstract #SM51B-03

Physics

2732 Magnetosphere Interactions With Satellites And Rings, 2780 Solar Wind Interactions With Unmagnetized Bodies, 6280 Saturnian Satellites

Scientific paper

The interaction of Titan's ionosphere with Saturn's magnetospheric plasma is complicated by the significant size of the ion gyroradii relative to the size of Titan. Voyager 1 found a two species plasma consisting of H+ and N+ with number densities of 0.1 and 0.2 cm-3 respectively, near Titan. The gyroradii of the incident N+ was found to be 2.25 RT (1 RT = 2575 km), while the gyroradii of the H+ was smaller at 0.16 RT. In addition Voyager detected the presence of several pickup ion species. The heavy pickup ion species (N2+, H2CN+, C2H5+) are expected to have gyroradii 4-5 RT. The scale of the interaction region is dominated by the size of the ambient and pickup ion gyroradii rather than the size of Titan. We investigate Titan's interaction with its surrounding plasma environment using multispecies hybrid simulations. We use a H+ and N+ upstream plasma and represent Titan's ionosphere by three generic ion species, a light, medium and heavy using the same formalism as Cravens et al.(1998). The magnetospheric plasma parameters (density, temperature, magnetic field and velocity) near Titan are based on 3-D MHD simulations of Saturn's magnetosphere (Hansen, 2001). We apply our results to the conditions expected at Titan during the first flyby of Cassini in October later this year.

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