Coupling between the magnetospheres of Ganymede and Jupiter (Invited)

Details Coupling between the magnetospheres of Ganymede and Jupiter (Invited) Coupling between the magnetospheres of Ganymede and Jupiter (Invited)

Dec 2009

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2009agufmsm11c..06p&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2009, abstract #SM11C-06

Physics

[2732] Magnetospheric Physics / Magnetosphere Interactions With Satellites And Rings, [2736] Magnetospheric Physics / Magnetosphere/Ionosphere Interactions, [2753] Magnetospheric Physics / Numerical Modeling, [6222] Planetary Sciences: Solar System Objects / Ganymede

Scientific paper

The Galilean moon Ganymede provides a unique case study in furthering our understanding of how space plasmas interact with planetary magnetospheres. Ganymede is the largest of Jupiter's moons and the only one to have its own magnetosphere, which is embedded within the large Jovian magnetosphere. The upstream flow and magnetic field strength of Jupiter’s magnetospheric plasma incident to Ganymede varies depending on the location of the Jovian plasma sheet, causing the flow to range from sub-Alfvénic to MA ~ 1. In order to understand the complex interactions in this system, we have implemented a novel three-dimensional modeling technique that represents different ion sources as collisionless fluids that interact via electric and magnetic fields. The results from this multi-fluid treatment are well correlated with observations of aurora and magnetic fields, and demonstrate the important role heavy ions play in governing the shape and dynamics of Ganymede's magnetosphere. The multi-fluid nature of the simulations also allows one to track the differential acceleration of heavy and light mass ions sourced from Ganymede's ionosphere and the Jovian magnetosphere. Thus, sampling the simulated ion energies, temperatures and densities for each ion species along Galileo’s trajectory permits the representation of simulated data in a way directly comparable to ion energy spectrograms from Galileo.

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