Studies of Excited Species in Planetary Upper Atmospheres

Details Studies of Excited Species in Planetary Upper Atmospheres Studies of Excited Species in Planetary Upper Atmospheres

Jan 1996

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1996suny.reptr....f&link_type=abstract

Technical Report, State Univ. of New York Stony Brook, NY United States Institute for Terrestrial and Planetary Atmospheres and

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Electron Density Profiles, Excitation, Ion Recombination, Planetary Atmospheres, Solar Activity, Titan, Venus (Planet), Mars (Planet), Ion Production Rates, Ionopause, Thermosphere, Venus Atmosphere, Astronomical Models

Scientific paper

During the course of the last year, we have been studying various aspects of the chemistry of excited states in the atmospheres of Venus, Mars, and Titan. We have investigated the solar activity variation of the dayside ionosphere and thermosphere of Venus by constructing models and comparing them to measured electron density profiles from PV ORO data. Our neutral models were the VTS3 models of Hedin et al (1983), and we included 14 ions and 5 neutral species. The solar fluxes adopted were the f79050n and sc2lrefw spectra from Hinteregger (private communication). We found that the variability in the ion production rates and density profiles at the peak is much smaller than that at higher altitudes. The relative lack of variability in the peak density is partly due to the destruction of the ion by dissociative recombination, which produces a square root dependence of the density on the production rates. The production rate of O(+) at 200 km increases by a factor of 9 from low to high solar activity, and the density varies by a slightly smaller factor, since the loss is by reaction with CO2, which only increases slightly with solar activity. Thus the large inferred change in the day-to-night transport of ions is easily explained as being due to a combination of changes in the dayside O(+) densities and the changing height of the ionopause.

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