Modeling variability in the night side ionosphere of Mars

Details Modeling variability in the night side ionosphere of Mars Modeling variability in the night side ionosphere of Mars

Dec 2008

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2008agufm.p13b1318l&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2008, abstract #P13B-1318

Computer Science

Sound

2423 Ionization Processes (7823), 5405 Atmospheres (0343, 1060), 5408 Aurorae And Airglow, 5435 Ionospheres (2459), 7823 Ionization Processes (2423)

Scientific paper

The night side ionosphere of Mars is known to be highly variable: essentially nonexistent in certain geographic locations, while occasionally nearly as strong as the photoionization-produced dayside ionosphere in other places. Using a coupled kinetic Monte Carlo/multi-fluid approach, we model the dynamics of precipitating solar wind electrons on the Martian night side and calculate resulting ionospheric density profiles. We investigate the broad observed range of precipitating electron properties by varying the electron pitch angle distributions (i.e. field-aligned versus isotropic) and energy spectra (i.e. typical versus low-energy flux enhancement versus accelerated). We further investigate the coupled geographic and seasonal variations in nightside ionospheric profiles by varying the strength of the crustal magnetic field, the angle between the crustal field and external field and the atmospheric neutral density profile. We compare these modeling results to precipitating electron spectra, observed total electron content (TEC) measurements and nightside density profiles measured by the ASPERA-3 and MARSIS radar sounding experiments on Mars Express. These comparisons provide insight into the processes, both internal (seasonal variation in thermospheric neutral densities, plasma transport by neutral winds) and external (precipitating plasma properties), that control the night side ionosphere.

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