Other
Scientific paper
Dec 2008
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2008agufm.u21a0044y&link_type=abstract
American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2008, abstract #U21A-0044
Other
0328 Exosphere, 2756 Planetary Magnetospheres (5443, 5737, 6033), 6235 Mercury
Scientific paper
From the observations by Mariner 10, it has been suggested that the Mercury's magnetosphere might be an analogous to the Earth's magnetosphere. Observation by MESSENGER in Janurary 2008 seems to support this assumption under a quiet solar wind condition. On the other hand, the temporal and spatial scales of the Mercury's magnetosphere are much smaller than those in the Earth's magnetosphere because of its week intrinsic magnetic field and strong dynamic pressure of the solar wind at the Mercury's orbit. The MHD simulation is one of the powerful methods to understand global structure of the magnetosphere. However, in the Mercury's magnetosphere, it should be pointed out that the kinetic effects of plasma might not be negligible because of a large gyro-radius of heavy ions. Statistical trajectory tracing of test particles is an important scheme to investigate the kinetic effects of particles. Previous studies by Delcourt et al. [2003; 2005] used analytical models of electric and magnetic fields that are obtained by rescaling the Earth's magnetosphere and calculated the motion of planetary sodium ions. Although this approach is efficient to see the dynamics of heavy ions, resultant properties largely depend on the field models. Therefore, it is important to examine the particle motion in the self-consistent MHD magnetic field. Delcourt and Seki [2006] suggested that dynamics of sodium ions is sensitive to the solar wind conditions based on trajectory tracings of the sodium ions in the magnetic and electric fields obtained from MHD simulation with southward IMF. In this study, we will present results of statistical trajectory tracing of sodium ions in the electric and magnetic field configuration obtained by a new MHD simulation code that automatically satisfies divB=0 condition [Yagi et al. Comput. Phys. Commun., submitted, 2008] to avoid artificial acceleration/deceleration. Initial states of sodium ions are given from an exospheric model [Leblanc and Johnson, 2003], which is also used in the previous studies of the statistical trajectory tracings. In this presentation, we discuss the effect of the solar wind conditions on the sodium dynamics in the Mercury's magnetosphere.
Delcourt Dominique
LeBlanc Francis
Matsumoto Yosuke
Seki Kazuhiko
Yagi Masafumi
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