Supervisor : Prof Mark Lester (mle@ion.le.ac.uk)

Details of Project

The Martian Space Environment is a unique system within the solar system.  Although the planet has no internal dipole magnetic field such as the Earth or the Gas Giants, there are localised regions of crustal magnetic field.  The lack of a global field but the existence of localised field regions means that the ionosphere is in part a magnetised plasma and in part a non-magnetised plasma.  The interaction between the solar wind and the planets ionosphere is therefore different depending on the existence of not of the magnetic field.  To investigate this unique situation we plan to study the ionised regions using a variety of past and current data sets.  Simple models of the system will also be developed to investigate the way these regions couple together and teh strength of the coupling. 

Sources of Data

Mars Global Surveyor
Mars Express 

Background Reading

Space Science Reviews, Vol. 139, No. 1- 4, Guest Editors, Andrew F. Nagy, Andre Balogh, Thomas E. Cravens, Michael Mendillo and Ingo Müller-Wodarg, August 2008.
Space Science Reviews, Vol. 126, No. 1- 4, Guest Editor, Christopher Russell, October 2006.