Variability of precipitating ion fluxes during the September 2017 event at Mars

Antoine Martinez (1) , François Leblanc (1) , Jean-Yves Chaufray (1) , Ronan Modolo (1) , Norberto Romanelli (1) , S. Curry (2) , J. Luhmann (2) , R. Lillis (2) , T. Hara (2) , J. Mcfadden (2) , J. Halekas (3) , F. Eparvier (4) , D. Larson (2) , J. Connerney (5) , Y. Ma (6, 7) , M. Holmström (8) , O. Witasse (9) , B. M. Jakosky (4)

1 HELIOS - LATMOS
2 SSL - Space Sciences Laboratory [Berkeley]
3 Department of Physics and Astronomy [Iowa City]
4 LASP - Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics [Boulder]
5 GSFC - NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
6 Imaging Sciences and Biomedical Engineering Division [London]
7 EPSS - Department of Earth, Planetary and Space Sciences [Los Angeles]
8 IRF - Swedish Institute of Space Physics [Uppsala / Kiruna]
9 ESTEC - European Space Research and Technology Centre

In this work, we study the influence of the September 2017 solar event on the precipitating heavy ion fluxes towards Mars' atmosphere as seen by MAVEN/SWIA, an energy and angular ion spectrometer and by MAVEN/STATIC, an energy, mass and angular ion spectrometer. After a careful reconstruction of the background induced by the Solar Energetic Particle (SEP) event in the MAVEN/SWIA spectrometer, we investigate the precipitating ion flux responses to the space weather events that took place in September 2017. This period is a unique opportunity to analyze the respective role of various possible drivers of heavy ion precipitation into Mars’ atmosphere with a wide range of different space weather events occurring during the same month. This study shows an increase in the precipitation flux by more than one order of magnitude during the arrival of the September Interplanetary Coronal Mass Ejection (ICME) compared to the average flux during quiet solar conditions. We also showed that among the possible solar drivers, the solar wind dynamic pressure is the most significant during September 2017.

Domaines: Astrophysique [astro-ph]; Physique de l'espace [physics.space-ph]

Antoine Martinez, François Leblanc, Jean-Yves Chaufray, Ronan Modolo, Norberto Romanelli, et al.. Variability of precipitating ion fluxes during the September 2017 event at Mars. Journal of Geophysical Research Space Physics, 2019, 124 (1), pp.420-432. ⟨10.1029/2018JA026123⟩. ⟨insu-01971899⟩