Plasma Wave Activity Near Venus as Seen by the Venus Express Spacecraft

Details Plasma Wave Activity Near Venus as Seen by the Venus Express Spacecraft Plasma Wave Activity Near Venus as Seen by the Venus Express Spacecraft

Dec 2007

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2007agufm.p33b1301g&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2007, abstract #P33B-1301

Physics

2780 Solar Wind Interactions With Unmagnetized Bodies, 6295 Venus

Scientific paper

We present a wave activity map of the Venusian space environment obtained from data of the Venus Express (VEX) magnetometer (MAG). Venus Express is the first European mission to the planet Venus and was inserted in a polar orbit with a duration of 24 hours in April 2006. Due to its different orbit in comparison to the long lasting mission of the Pioneer Venus Orbiter (PVO), it can complete the lack of measurments and leads to a better understanding of the processes occurring within the Venusian magnetosphere and the interaction between the solar wind and the planet's atmosphere. The magnetometer onboard VEX measures the magnetic field vector continously during one orbit. We used for our calculations the data from April to December 2006 with a resolution of four seconds. We made a Fourier Analysis of this data set and determined a mean value of the power spectral densities in different frequency bands. In doing so, we were mainly interested in ultra low frequency (ULF) waves, whose frequencies are less than the gyro-frequencies of the typical species in that region. The wave activity maps show a region of enhanced activity in the magnetosheath between the subsolar point and the terminator. Ion density measurements of the ASPERA-4 instrument onboard VEX shall help to explain these results by determination of the Alfvén velocity, in particular the Alfvén Mach number. We speculate that regions of high wave activity and regions of sub-Alfvén Mach numbers are in general overlapping, because the waves there can propagate in all directions. We discuss this phenomenon, including possible reasons for the occurrence.

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