Combined modeling of Mercury's interaction with solar wind, and the sodium population in its exosphere and magnetosphere

Details Combined modeling of Mercury's interaction with solar wind, and the sodium population in its exosphere and magnetosphere Combined modeling of Mercury's interaction with solar wind, and the sodium population in its exosphere and magnetosphere

Dec 2011

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2011agufm.p41a1598t&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2011, abstract #P41A-1598

Physics

[0328] Atmospheric Composition And Structure / Exosphere, [2753] Magnetospheric Physics / Numerical Modeling, [6235] Planetary Sciences: Solar System Objects / Mercury

Scientific paper

Recent measurements performed with the FIPS instrument [Zurbuchen et al., 2008] onboard of MESSENGER indicates that the magnetosphere of Mercury is rich in heavy ions originated from planet's exosphere. The most abundant ion species, Na+, is produced by ionization of the neutral sodium atoms supplied into the exosphere by sputtering. Being picked up and accelerated, Na+ enters into the magnetosphere. It has been suggested that sodium ions play an important role in the dynamics of the magnetosphere by forming a planetary ion boundary layer [Slavin et al., 2008]. Simulation of the Na+ population in the magnetosphere is a challenging problem and should involve both a correct description of the source processes for the ions as well as a model of the interaction of Mercury with the surrounding solar wind plasma. Here we describe the results of our numerical study of the sodium ions distribution in Mercury's magnetosphere by modeling the neutral sodium exosphere, appropriate photolytic reactions, and large-scale interaction of Mercury with solar wind at conditions relevant to the MESSENGER mission. A kinetic Monte Carlo model is used to simulate the distribution of the neutral sodium atoms in the exosphere. Being ionized, newly born Na+ are traced as test particles in the electric/magnetic fields obtained from a global MHD simulation of Mercury's magnetosphere. Such an approach cannot be considered as completely self-consistent because the charge and current densities associated with Na+ are neglected in calculation of the fields. However, even this approximation will allow qualitatively evaluate the importance of the Na+ population for determining the distribution of the electric/magnetic fields in Mercury's magnetosphere. The simulations will be performed at conditions relevant to the MESSENGER mission and we will present comparisons with the observations.

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