Escape of Mars Photoionized Electrons from Carbon Dioxide and Atomic Oxygen in 2004

Details Escape of Mars Photoionized Electrons from Carbon Dioxide and Atomic Oxygen in 2004 Escape of Mars Photoionized Electrons from Carbon Dioxide and Atomic Oxygen in 2004

Dec 2008

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2008agufm.p13b1321f&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2008, abstract #P13B-1321

Statistics

2459 Planetary Ionospheres (5435, 5729, 6026), 2463 Plasma Convection (2760), 5421 Interactions With Particles And Fields, 5443 Magnetospheres (2756), 6225 Mars

Scientific paper

Photoelectron peaks in the atmosphere caused by the ionization of carbon dioxide and atomic oxygen by Solar 30.4 nm photons have been observed by the Electron Spectrometer (ELS), a component of the Mars Express (MEx) Analyzer of Space Plasmas and Energetic Atoms (ASPERA-3) Experiment. Most of the ionizations occur near the Mars exobase, with a significant fraction of the photoelectrons following the local magnetic field line. A fraction of these are able to escape the planetary ionosphere by flowing down the tail and (presumably) out of the Martian environment. In this paper we use properties of the measured photoelectron spectrum to estimate the loss rate of electrons produced by the above ionization processes. Specifically, we use ELS data taken between 5 January 2004 and 25 January 2005 to collect statistics of occurrence of the characteristic photoelectron spectral peaks; using example spectra, we demonstrate the techniques of identifying and selecting the spectral peaks; and we obtain an estimate of the flux of electrons in the peaks flowing away from the planet. Our results yield an average rate of escape from Mars of 2.47x105 electrons /(cm2 s) over the year 2004. At a distance of 1.5 RMars tailward of the planetary center, an estimate of the outflow area, 1.16x1018 cm2, allows estimation of the electron escape rate of 2.85x1023 electrons/s. This gives about 9x1030 electrons or 15 Mmole which escaped Mars in 2004 due to the ionization of carbon dioxide and atomic oxygen by the He 30.4 nm line.

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