Inner Heliospheric Gas and Dust from Solar Wind Charge Exchange

Details Inner Heliospheric Gas and Dust from Solar Wind Charge Exchange Inner Heliospheric Gas and Dust from Solar Wind Charge Exchange

May 2002

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2002agusmsh22c..04c&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Spring Meeting 2002, abstract #SH22C-04

Physics

7837 Neutral Particles, 2151 Neutral Particles

Scientific paper

The Low Energy Neutral Atom (LENA) imager, launched on the IMAGE spacecraft in March of 2000, detects neutral atoms with energies from 10 eV up to >1 keV. Because LENA has low sensitivity to light and looks directly at the Sun every spin during six months of the year, it has observed a neutral component of the solar wind (NSW) that results when solar wind ions charge exchange with interstellar neutrals, with dust and with the Earth's geocorona [Collier et al., JGR, 106, 24,893, 2001]. We examine long-term variations in the intensity of the counting rate from the solar direction (NSW). Results from year 2001, during which the instrument state remained constant, show a maximum in the count rate between June and July with a long, low count-rate period stretching from mid-November through early March. This annual modulation of solar wind energetic neutral atom flux at the Earth is interpreted as a pronounced variation of the neutral gas column density between the Sun and the Earth with season. This modulation is evidently dominated by interstellar neutral gas and the solar erosion of that gas in the galactic downstream region. It also contains a relatively constant contribution from inner solar system dust and relatively smaller variations produced by solar wind fluctuations and possibly structure in the dust population. The LENA observations place an upper limit on the column density of dust at 1 AU of less than 6x10-19 cm-1. Implications of the LENA data on the interpretation of observations of low frequency electromagnetic waves by Tsurutani et al. [GRL, 21, 633, 1994] will also be considered.

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