| Vol. 27, Issue 1 |
Focusing on the magnetic pileup boundary, a feature in the solar wind interaction with Mars, Crider et al. [45] track the evolution of the electron distribution function of one orbit of the Mars Global Surveyor. They find that the draping of solar wind field lines around crustal magnetic fields leads to strong interactions, including impact ionization of the Martian atmosphere, which facilitates the production of plasma that supports both the pileup of the magnetic field and the distinctive features in the electron distributions. The authors also report that the new ions produced are easily picked up by the solar wind and swept off the planet. Moldwin et al. [57] describe a sample of small-scale magnetic flux ropes observed at 1 AU by the WIND and IMP 8 satellites, and they suggest that these events are signatures of magnetic reconnection in the solar wind and not in the solar corona. They find that, although the small-scale magnetic flux ropes are similar to magnetic clouds, there are some important differences such as a disparity in size (the clouds are much larger), different proton temperature behavior (proton temperature in magnetic clouds is consistently lower than the ambient solar wind), and a lack of expansion of the small magnetic rope structures (magnetic clouds generally expand at 1 AU). |
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