Conveners
CD7 - Space weather at unmagnetized or weakly magnetized solar system objects: Orals
- Sofia Bergman (KTH Royal Institute of Technology)
- Gabriella Stenberg Wieser (Swedish Institute of Space Physics)
- Charlotte Götz (Northumbria University)
Description
Many objects in the solar system lack an intrinsic magnetic field, for example some planets, moons, comets, and other small bodies. The interaction of these objects with the solar wind is fundamentally different to the interaction of the solar wind with magnetized bodies such as the Earth. This session will focus on space weather effects on the surface, atmosphere and space environment of such bodies.
Topics include, but are not limited to, the response to a varying space weather and the effects of extreme solar events on the surface, atmosphere, and plasma environment. We also invite abstracts discussing the influence of the space environment on spacecraft operation and scientific instrument performance close to these bodies.
We welcome abstracts addressing these topics using a variety of methods, including laboratory experiments, numerical modelling and observations.
The Rosetta mission followed comet 67P over heliospheric distances ranging from 1.25 to 3.6 AU. A come tis essentially a gas cloud embedded in the solar wind. When gas molecules are ionized they are picked up by the solar wind stream, the solar wind is “mass loaded”. The initial reaction of the solar wind to mass loading is to be deflected in the direction opposite to the solar wind electric...
A chain of CME events, occured on September 2014, led to strong perturbations in the interplanetary magnetic field and remarkable enhancements in the energetic particle fluxes measured at different heliospheric distances. We conducted a multi-spacecraft and multi-parameter analysis of such intense events, using observations from a fleet of spacecraft distributed in the inner Solar System, such...
Waves in the cometary plasma environment occur at almost every activity level of a comet, both far away from the Sun and near its perihelion. They play an important role in the thermalization of the cometary pick-up ions and in the redistribution of energy. Upstream of the nucleus and for several thousands of kilometers downstream the gyrating motion of both the solar wind (SW) plasma and the...
The Lunar Surface, while exposed to different plasma and radiation regimes along its orbit around Earth, is also encountering time varying conditions when transitioning from quiet solar activity to solar storms, leading to CMEs crossing, EUV and X-rays fluxes changes or perturbed magnetospheric conditions. In addition, lunar surface topography and illumination changes lead to a variety of...
Solar wind protons precipitating onto the lunar regolith is partially backscattered to space and leads to sputtering of surface materials. Particles emitted to space have a charge state distribution determined by the lunar regolith and independent of the precipitating particle. Recent measurements on the lunar surface by the NILS instrument[1] on Chang’e-6 and the ASAN instrument[2] on...
RHybrid (paRallel Hybrid) is a highly parallel hybrid space plasma simulation platform based on the macroscopic particle cloud-in-cell (CIC) technique for kinetic ions and the staggered Cartesian mesh grid method for electric and magnetic fields and charge-neutralizing fluid electrons. RHybrid has been used extensively for interpretation of spacecraft observations from plasma environments of...
Magnetospheric jets are regions of enhanced dynamic pressure in the magnetosheath. They are usually associated to the region behind a quasi-parallel shock and have been well documented at Earth.
However in recent years there have been efforts to identify these structures in other magnetosheaths as well. For example, recently it has been shown that they exist in the Martian magnetosheath. As...
Solar extreme ultraviolet (EUV) and X-ray photons are a primary source of energy for the upper atmospheres of terrestrial planets. Soft X-ray (SXR, 0-10 nm) irradiance is quite variable, particularly during solar flare events, and is difficult to extrapolate to other planets based on Earth observations alone. Meanwhile, photoelectrons are a product of solar EUV and SXR irradiance photoionizing...
