Other
Scientific paper
Dec 2010
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2010agufm.p11a1315k&link_type=abstract
American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2010, abstract #P11A-1315
Other
[5405] Planetary Sciences: Solid Surface Planets / Atmospheres, [5443] Planetary Sciences: Solid Surface Planets / Magnetospheres, [6235] Planetary Sciences: Solar System Objects / Mercury
Scientific paper
The ratio of sodium to potassium in the exosphere of Mercury is higher than that on other solar system planets. However, previous studies have not revealed the cause of such high Na/K ratio. The purpose of this study is to investigate the cause of observed high Na/K ratio. Because atoms in the exosphere of Mercury are ejected from the surface, the Na/K ratio in the exosphere will reflect the ratio in the surface if the production and loss rates for sodium and potassium are identical, but such high Na/K ratio on the surface seems not plausible. Therefore, the observed Na/K ratio suggests that the production and loss rates for sodium and potassium are different and the causes of this difference seems to be the effect that ions reimpact onto the surface. Since the gyroradius of the potassium ion is larger than the sodium ion, it is expected that the difference in the quantity of impact between the potassium ion and sodium ion (Potter et al., 2002). We especially take into account this effect in our study and investigate the quantity of the impacted potassium ion and sodium ion by means of simulation. To investigate the quantity of impacted ions, we calculated the exosphere distribution with taking into account the source and loss process, and then produced the ion distribution. We calculated the trajectories of ions using this ion distribution as initial condition, and investigated the quantity of impacted ions. Proposed source processes of Mercury’s exosphere are thermal desorption, photo-stimulated desorption, micro meteorite vaporization and solar wind sputtering, and this calculation perform each source process. As a result, the observed Na/K ratio is likely to be explained by solar wind sputtering. We report the calculated quantity of impacted ions and discuss their influence on the Na/K ratio in the exosphere in this presentation.
Kagitani Masato
Kaneko Kazuhisa
Okano Shinya
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