Comprehensive Venus boundaries model

Since Venus is an unmagnetized planet, it doesn’t interact with the solar wind in the same way as planets with an intrinsic magnetic field do. Due to its conductive ionosphere, however, it still possesses an induced magnetosphere. Venus’s magnetosphere contains different boundaries, identified by changes in the plasma or magnetic field characteristics. The boundaries we studied in this project are the bow shock and the Ion Composition Boundary (ICB). Previous studies identified the boundaries’ locations and compared them with plasma measurements outside of the magnetosphere, finding how the boundaries react to varying solar wind upstream conditions. What has been more rarely done, instead, is to find the analytical dependency of the bow shock and ICB on the upstream conditions. This was the purpose of this project. Developing this comprehensive analytical model allows us to determine the location of the boundaries, once the upstream conditions are defined. We used a database of boundary crossings and upstream conditions measurements deriving from the Venus EXpress (VEX). The procedure we followed was first to divide the boundaries crossings into bins, analyzing one upstream condition at a time. Then, we fitted the crossings using analytical equations depending on geometrical parameters. For the bow shock we used a conic section with semi-latus rectum L and eccentricity ε as geometrical parameters, for the dayside ICB we used a circumference with the radius R as geometrical parameter. We fitted these geometrical parameters with the upstream conditions in each bin and found the final model. The final equation for the bow shock depends on the Interplanetary Magnetic Field (IMF) magnitude, the solar wind momentum, and the angle between the IMF direction and the local shock normal. For the ICB the final equation depends on the solar wind energy flux and the solar Extreme UltraViolet (EUV) flux. Given these solar wind and IMF properties, the geometrical parameters of the boundaries are uniquely identified. Then, we were able to determine the boundaries’ locations and shapes with higher accuracy than the general fitting models that don’t consider upstream conditions. For the bow shock we improved the accuracy by 17%, for the ICB by 8%.