In a plasma environment particles and plasma waves have complex interactions and can affect each other significantly. The velocity distribution functions (VDFs) can effectively be used to try and understand these interactions. This study uses VDFs to investigate heavy ion temperatures in the Venusian plasma environment. A Maxwellian fitting methodology previously used to obtain proton plasma parameters is used to obtain plasma parameters for heavy ions instead. Ion and magnetic-field data are gathered from the ion mass analyser IMA and the magnetometer MAG which were on board the European spacecraft Venus Express. The temperature anisotropies are analysed to see if they may affect the observed plasma waves around Venus. Spatial maps of the obtained plasma parameters are presented, and the average values are shown. The temperature ratio T⊥/T∥ is calculated to look for anisotropies. Case studies were made to investigate how well the methodology worked with heavy ion data. The methodology is shown to work well in the magnetotail, where heavy ions are expected, and less well in the magnetosheath and solar wind, where heavy ions were not expected. No statistically significant anisotropies were found for the heavy ions in the Venusian plasma environment.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:ltu-85096 |
| Date | January 2021 |
| Creators | Lindblom, Ville |
| Publisher | Luleå tekniska universitet, Institutionen för system- och rymdteknik |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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