Speaker
Description
The Jovian system is very intriguing with extremely different particle sources ranging from the volcanic Io to the frozen world of Europa with both existing within Jupiter’s relatively high radiation magnetospheric environment. While Voyager, Galileo and Cassini provided historic observations of this unique environment, they also raised numerous questions. As the dominant source of particles to Jupiter’s magnetosphere, Io is of particular importance. However, this source is not well understood with total rate estimates varying from 700-2400 kg/sec and even the specific source mechanisms (ex. volcanic vs. sublimation) are under debate. Thus, characterizing the Io source is required to understand Jupiter’s magnetosphere as well as enabling understanding of the minor (but extremely important) source, Since its launch in 2013, the JAXA Hisaki (SPRINT-A) mission offers the potential to answer some of these questions and help make future missions more successful.
The JAXA Hisaki mission has provided unprecedented observations of the Jovian system with its extreme ultraviolet (EUV) spectroscope (EXCEED) instrument. In particular, it’s UV neutral oxygen line of sight observations provide the best glimpse so far of Jovian neutral particle populations. This is exciting in that for the first time, the neutral tori can be directly observed on time scales that constrain satellite sources. The current Hisaki oxygen UV line of sight (LOS) observations are already revealing an intriguing amount of spatial and temporal. This data can also shed unprecedented insight into neutral torus distributions which could subsequently provide essential information about the sources and mechanisms from Io. However, 3-D modeling is required to interpret the complex and dynamic observational geometries. Thus, for this presentation, we show preliminary research that combines Hisaki neutral oxygen LOS observations with computational modeling to identify and characterize Io’s source of particles to Jupiter’s magnetosphere.
