3-D Full-kinetic Simulations of the Solar Wind Interaction with Lunar Magnetic Anomalies: Particle Behaviour

Abstract:

We present three-dimensional full-kinetic electromagnetic simulations of the solar wind interaction with lunar crustal magnetic anomalies (LMAs). Using the implicit particle-in-cell code iPic3D, we confirm that LMAs may indeed be strong enough to stand off the solar wind from directly impacting the lunar surface forming a mini-magnetosphere, as suggested by spacecraft observations and theory. In contrast to earlier MHD and hybrid simulations, the full-kinetic nature of iPic3D allows to self-consistently investigate space charge effects, and in particular the electron dynamics dominating the near-surface lunar plasma environment. We describe the general mechanism of the interaction of both a horizontal and vertical dipole model embedded just below the lunar surface focussing on the ion and electron kinetic behaviour of the system. It is shown that the configurations are largely dominated by electron motion, because the LMA scale size is small with respect to the gyro-radius of the solar wind ions. The formation of mini-magnetospheres is an electrostatic effect. Additionally, we discuss typical particle trajectories as well as complete particle distribution functions covering thermal and suprathermal energies, within the interaction region and on viable spacecraft altitudes. 

Our work opens new frontiers of research toward a deeper understanding of LMAs and is ideally suited to be compared with field or particle observations from spacecraft such as Kaguya (SELENE), Lunar Prospector or ARTEMIS. The ability to evaluate the implications for future lunar exploration as well as lunar science in general hinges on a better understanding of LMAs.

This research has received funding from the European Commission’s FP7 Program with the grant agreement EHEROES (project 284461, www.eheroes.eu). The simulations were conducted on the computational resources provided by the PRACE Tier-0 project 2013091928 (SuperMUC). This research was supported by the Swedish National Space Board, Grant No. 136/11. This work was supported by NASA’s SSSERVI/IMPACT. This work also utilised the Janus supercomputer, supported by NSF (CNS-0821794) and CU Boulder.