Greifswald 2024 – scientific programme
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EP: Fachverband Extraterrestrische Physik
EP 2: Planets in their Environment
EP 2.4: Talk
Tuesday, February 27, 2024, 15:30–15:45, ELP 1: HS 1.22
MHD simulations of Europa's interaction with the jovian magnetosphere: insights from the Juno flyby — •Sebastian Cervantes1, Joachim Saur1, Stefan Duling1, Stephan Schlegel1, Jamey Szalay2, Frederic Allegrini3, and Jack Connerney4, 5 — 1Universität zu Köln, Institut für Geophysik und Meteorologie, Cologne, Germany — 2Princeton University, Princeton, USA — 3Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio, USA — 4Space Research Corporation, Annapolis, USA — 5NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, USA
We model the plasma interaction of Jupiter's magnetosphere with Europa and its atmosphere for the conditions of the flyby performed by NASA's Juno spacecraft. We apply the three-dimensional magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) single fluid PLUTO code based on Mignone et al., [2007], and we include in our model electromagnetic induction in a subsurface water ocean, collisions between ions and neutrals, plasma production due to electron impact ionization, and loss due to dissociative recombination. We model the effect of the recently detected electron beams by Allegrini et al. [2023] as sheets of locally enhanced electron impact ionization. We compare our simulations with the magnetic field and the total ion number density measurements from the magnetometer and the JADE detector onboard Juno, respectively. Our results show that the electron beams are essential in the plasma interaction by producing large variations of the magnetic field consistent with the magnetometer data, and by filling the wake with newly ionized plasma downstream of Europa.
Keywords: MHD modelling; moon-magnetosphere interaction; Jupiter; plasma physics; spacecraft data