New Perspectives on Solar Wind-Magnetosphere Coupling

The streaming plasma in the solar wind is a never ending source of energy, plasma, and momentum for planetary magnetospheres, and it continuously drives large-scale plasma convection systems in our magnetosphere and over our polar ionosphere. This coupling between the solar wind and the magnetosphere is primarily explained by two different processes: magnetic reconnection at high latitudes, which interconnects the interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) with the planetary dipole field, and low-latitude dynamos such as viscous interaction, where the streaming plasma in the solar wind may trigger waves and instabilities at the flanks of the magnetosphere, and thereby allow solar wind plasma to enter into the system.This work aims to further determine the nature and properties of these driving dynamos, both by statistical studies of their relative importance for ionospheric convection at Earth, and by assessment and analysis of the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability at Mercury, utilizing data from the MESSENGER spacecraft's first and third flyby of the planet.It is shown that the presence of the low-latitude dynamos is primarily dependent on the IMF direction: the driving is close to non-existent when the IMF is southward, but increases to the order of a third of the total ionospheric driving when the IMF turns northward (here, the magnitude of the driving is also shown to be dependent on the viscous parameters in the solar wind). The work also discusses the saturation of the reconnection generated potential, and shows that the terrestrial response follows a non-linear behavior for strong solar wind driving both when the IMF is southward and northward.Comparative studies of different magnetospheres provide an excellent path for increasing our understanding of space-related phenomena. Here, study of the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability at Mercury allows us to investigate how the different parameters of the system affect the mass, energy, and momentum transfer at the flanks of the magnetosphere. The large ion gyro radius expected is shown to develop a dawn-dusk asymmetry in the growth rates, with the dawn side as the more unstable of the two. This effect should be particularly visible when the planet is close to perihelion. Mercury's smaller scale size combined with the relatively high spacecraft velocity is also shown to provide excellent opportunities for studying the spatial structure of the waves, and a vortex reconstruction that can explain all the large-scale variations in the Kelvin-Helmholtz waves observed during MESSENGER's third Mercury flyby is presented.QC 2011040