Persson, M;
Aizawa, S;
André, N;
Barabash, S;
Saito, Y;
Harada, Y;
Heyner, D;
... Murakami, G; + view all
(2022)
BepiColombo mission confirms stagnation region of Venus and reveals its large extent.
Nature Communications
, 13
, Article 7743. 10.1038/s41467-022-35061-3.
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Abstract
The second Venus flyby of the BepiColombo mission offer a unique opportunity to make a complete tour of one of the few gas-dynamics dominated interaction regions between the supersonic solar wind and a Solar System object. The spacecraft pass through the full Venusian magnetosheath following the plasma streamlines, and cross the subsolar stagnation region during very stable solar wind conditions as observed upstream by the neighboring Solar Orbiter mission. These rare multipoint synergistic observations and stable conditions experimentally confirm what was previously predicted for the barely-explored stagnation region close to solar minimum. Here, we show that this region has a large extend, up to an altitude of 1900 km, and the estimated low energy transfer near the subsolar point confirm that the atmosphere of Venus, despite being non-magnetized and less conductive due to lower ultraviolet flux at solar minimum, is capable of withstanding the solar wind under low dynamic pressure.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | BepiColombo mission confirms stagnation region of Venus and reveals its large extent |
| Location: | England |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1038/s41467-022-35061-3 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-35061-3 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences > Dept of Space and Climate Physics |
| URI: | https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10162395 |
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