Pluto's atmosphere-plasma interaction: Hybrid simulations

Abstract:

Pluto's low gravity implies that the atmosphere is only weakly bound. The escaping neutrals are photoionized and the heavy ions (N₂⁺) move away from Pluto in the direction perpendicular to the solar wind flow (i.e., nearly unmagnetized relative to the length scales of the plasma interaction region). The turning distance of the solar wind protons at the magnetic pileup boundary is large compared to the interaction region. As a result, large ion gyroradius effects determine Pluto's highly asymmetric interaction with the solar wind. We use a three-dimensional hybrid code (fluid electrons, kinetic ions) to investigate the geometry of the interaction region using recent atmospheric models for hybrid simulation input. We will present initial results, showing the sensitivity of bow shock location to variations in the model atmosphere as well as variations in the solar wind conditions. Synthetic energy spectrograms taken from the simluations could be directly compared with the New Horizons plasma data to further constrain model input parameters. Initial results indicate that a full bow shock could form with possible structuring in the wake region due to bi-ion waves and Kelvin-Helmholtz waves.