Several years of neutral particle measurements by the NASA/IBEX mission have yielded direct observations of interstellar neutral helium and oxygen. The data indicate the presence of secondary neutral helium and oxygen, which are created within the heliosphere by charge exchange involving helium or oxygen ions. This contribution describes a detailed conserving calculation method based on Keplerian orbits that has been developed to characterize helium distribution functions throughout the heliosphere, in particular in the innermost heliosphere, while accounting for loss and production of neutral particles along their path. Coupled with global heliosphere models of plasma distributions, this code is useful for predicting the fluxes of heavy neutral atoms at spacecraft detectors, so enabling inferences on the characteristics of the interstellar medium.
@article{arxiv.1205.1555,
title = {Direct modeling of neutral helium in the heliosphere},
author = {Hans-Reinhard Mueller},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1205.1555},
year = {2012}
}
Comments
To appear in proceedings of the 6th International Conference of Numerical Modeling of Space Plasma Flows (ASTRONUM 2011) (June 13-17, 2011, Valencia, Spain), N.V. Pogorelov and J.A. Font (Eds.), ASP Conference Series 459, in press