Sneaking of the Solar Wind Ions Into the Lunar Anti-subsolar Region Revealed by SELENE (Kaguya)

Details Sneaking of the Solar Wind Ions Into the Lunar Anti-subsolar Region Revealed by SELENE (Kaguya) Sneaking of the Solar Wind Ions Into the Lunar Anti-subsolar Region Revealed by SELENE (Kaguya)

Dec 2008

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2008agufm.p31b1395n&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2008, abstract #P31B-1395

Other

1221 Lunar And Planetary Geodesy And Gravity (5417, 5450, 5714, 5744, 6019, 6250), 2780 Solar Wind Interactions With Unmagnetized Bodies, 7807 Charged Particle Motion And Acceleration, 7815 Electrostatic Structures

Scientific paper

The moon spends more than 80 percent of its life staying in the solar wind (SW), where a quasi-vacuum region called the lunar wake is formed on the night side. The SW electrons with higher energy can come to the lunar night-side surface, while it has been thought that the SW ions are unlikely to approach the low altitude region on the night side because their thermal speed is much lower than the SW bulk speed. Here we show detection of SW ions sneaking into the anti-subsolar region at ~100 km altitude, using recent comprehensive measurement by a Japanese lunar orbiter SELENE (Kaguya). The sneaking of SW ions into the deepest lunar wake was accompanied by an enhancement of counter-streaming electrons along the SW magnetic field. A part of the ions detected in the anti-subsolar region came from the lunar surface, which means that the ions of solar wind origin reflected at the night-side surface. One possibility is that electron- rich wake environment strengthened the bipolar electric field at the wake boundary to let solar-wind ions approach the lunar night side, and the other scenario is that enhancement of ions in the wake let ambient electrons to come in. The sneaking mechanism of the solar wind ions in terms of plasma and electromagnetic environment around/inside the lunar wake will be discussed.

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