MHD Simulations of the Interaction between Ganymede and Jupiter's Magnetosphere

Details MHD Simulations of the Interaction between Ganymede and Jupiter's Magnetosphere MHD Simulations of the Interaction between Ganymede and Jupiter's Magnetosphere

Dec 2007

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2007agufm.p13f..01j&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2007, abstract #P13F-01

Physics

2740 Magnetospheric Configuration And Dynamics, 2753 Numerical Modeling, 6033 Magnetospheres (2756), 6222 Ganymede

Scientific paper

Ganymede is unique among planetary moons because it has its own magnetic field strong enough to form a magnetosphere within Jupiter's magnetospheric environment. We have performed a series of global MHD simulations to understand the interaction between Ganymede and Jupiter's magnetosphere using several field and particle data sets from Galileo as boundary conditions. Our simulations show that, in addition to the familiar structures such as the magnetopause and equatorial current sheet, Ganymede's magnetosphere extends into an Alfv\acute{e}n wing that mediates the interaction of Ganymede with the plasma and ionosphere of Jupiter. We show that the magnetospheric current system at Ganymede is analogous to the interaction of Io with the Jovian plasma as well as to the interactions between the solar wind and planetary magnetospheres. In the simulation, magnetic reconnection, which is the primary process for plasma and energy transport in the magnetosphere, is found to take place over a large longitude range around the moon. The simulations reproduce quite closely the magnetic field structure measured by the Galileo magnetometer for all six close encounters. However, our simulated magnetosphere is slightly smaller than the observed one. We will discuss several factors that can possibly cause the discrepancies in the current model, such as mass-loading, Ganymede's intrinsic magnetic field and grid resolution in the simulation.

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