Related papers: Titan interaction with the supersonic solar wind
The texture, composition, and morphology of dunes observed in the equatorial regions of Titan may reflect present and/or past climatic conditions. Determining the physio-chemical properties and the morphodynamics of Titan's dunes is…
Titan is one of the primary scientific objectives of the NASA ESA ASI Cassini Huygens mission. Scattering by haze particles in Titan's atmosphere and numerous methane absorptions dramatically veil Titan's surface in the visible range,…
Extrasolar planets appear in a chemical diversity unseen in our own solar system. Despite their atmospheres being cold, continuous and transient plasma processes do affect these atmosphere where clouds form with great efficiency. Clouds can…
The Voyager spacecraft is now approaching the edge of the solar system. Near the boundary between the solar system and the interstellar medium we find that an unstable ``jet-sheet'' forms. The jet-sheet oscillates up and down due to a…
The shape of the two gas giants, Jupiter and Saturn, is determined primarily by their rotation rate, and interior density distribution. It is also affected by their zonal winds, causing an anomaly of O(10 km) at low latitudes. However,…
Bathed in intense ionizing radiation, close-in gaseous planets undergo hydrodynamic atmospheric escape, which ejects the upper extent of their atmospheres into the interplanetary medium. Ultraviolet detections of escaping gas around…
Observations of planets throughout our Solar System have revealed that the Earth is not alone in possessing natural, inter-annual atmospheric cycles. The equatorial middle atmospheres of the Earth, Jupiter and Saturn all exhibit a…
The ionosphere of Titan hosts a complex ion chemistry leading to the formation of organic dust below 1200 km. Current models cannot fully explain the observed electron temperature in this dusty environment. To achieve new insight, we have…
The Cassini mission offered us the opportunity to monitor the seasonal evolution of Titan's atmosphere from 2004 to 2017, i.e. half a Titan year. The lower part of the stratosphere (pressures greater than 10 mbar) is a region of particular…
Characterised by a surface bound exosphere and localised crustal magnetic fields, the Moon was considered as a passive object when solar wind interacts with it. However, the neutral particle and plasma measurements around the Moon by recent…
Temperatures of the outer planet thermospheres exceed those predicted by solar heating alone by several hundred degrees. Enough energy is deposited at auroral regions to heat the entire thermosphere, but models predict that equatorward…
The Cassini mission unveiled the intense and diverse activity in Saturn's atmosphere: banded jets, waves, vortices, equatorial oscillations. To set the path towards a better understanding of those phenomena, we performed high-resolution…
We resolve the paradox that although magnetic collimation of an isotropic solar wind results in an enhancement of its proton flux along the polar directions, several observations indicate a wind proton flux peaked at the equator. To that…
This paper addresses the fundamental science question: "How does solar wind energy flow through the Earth's magnetosphere, how is it converted and distributed?". We need to understand how the Sun creates the heliosphere, and how the planets…
We analyze data from the final two years of the Cassini mission to retrieve the distributions of methane, ethane, acetylene, ethylene, and benzene in Saturn's upper stratosphere and mesosphere from stellar occultations observed by the…
We present a statistical analysis on the variability of the incompressible energy cascade rate in the solar wind around Mars, making use of an exact relation for fully developed turbulence and more than five years of Mars Atmosphere and…
Magnetohydrodynamical simulations are presented of a magnetized pulsar wind interacting directly with the interstellar medium, or, in the case of a surrounding supernova remnant, with the associated freely expanding ejecta of the progenitor…
Solar wind turbulence is a dynamical phenomenon that evolves with heliocentric distance. Orbiting Mars since September 2014, Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) offers a unique opportunity to explore some of its main properties…
Stellar winds of cool, main-sequence stars are very tenuous and difficult to observe. Despite carrying away only a small amount of the stellar mass, they are important for regulating the rotation of the star and, consequently, its activity…
High altitude clouds and hazes are integral to understanding exoplanet observations, and are proposed to explain observed featureless transit spectra. However, it is difficult to make inferences from these data because of the need to…