HR: 13:55h
AN: SH13B-02 INVITED    [Abstracts]
TI: Lunar atmosphere and surface analysis through in situ pickup ions
AU: * Zurbuchen, T H
EM: thomasz@umich.edu
AF: University of Michigan Department of AOSS, 2455 Hayward Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, United States
AU: Lundgren, R
EM: rlundgre@umich.edu
AF: University of Michigan Department of AOSS, 2455 Hayward Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, United States
AU: Keller, J
EM: john.w.keller@nasa.gov
AF: Goddard Space Flight Center, Code 692, Greenbelt, MD 20771, United States
AU: Baragiola, R
EM: raul@virginia.edu
AF: University of Virginia, Thornton Hall, Charlottesville, VA 22904, United States
AU: Collier, M
EM: michael.r.collier@nasa.gov
AF: Goddard Space Flight Center, Code 692, Greenbelt, MD 20771, United States
AU: Delory, G
EM: gdelory@ssl.berkeley.edu
AF: University of California Berkeley, Space Science Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720, United States
AU: Gloeckler, G
EM: gglo@umich.edu
AF: University of Michigan Department of AOSS, 2455 Hayward Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, United States
AU: Hartle, R
EM: richard.E.Hartle@nasa.gov
AF: Goddard Space Flight Center, Code 692, Greenbelt, MD 20771, United States
AU: Johnson, R
EM: rej@virginia.edu
AF: University of Virginia, Thornton Hall, Charlottesville, VA 22904, United States
AU: Killen, R
EM: rkillen@astro.umd.edu
AF: University of Maryland, Computer & Space Science Building, College Park, MD 20742, United States
AU: Lin, R
EM: rlin@ssl.berkeley.edu
AF: University of California Berkeley, Space Science Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720, United States
AB: The exploration of the lunar atmosphere and its relation to physical processes that dominate the interaction between the moon its space environment is enabled by the analysis of charged and neutrals from a near-lunar orbit. The Moon has an atmosphere, a collisionless exosphere in which material released from the surface is gravitationally bound. It is very tenuous and very fragile, very much affected and expected to be very much affected by the anticipated lunar exploration program. It is the purpose to this talk to outline the breakthrough science that can be done from a platform in a near-lunar orbit, detecting pickup ions from surface and atmospheric sources. We will discuss expected sources and sinks of these species. We will also focus on transient events from lunar quakes and from meteoritic impacts. Finally, we discuss a possible implementation of an instrument that could do these breakthrough measurements.
DE: 1026 Composition of the moon
DE: 2164 Solar wind plasma
DE: 6250 Moon (1221)
DE: 7537 Solar and stellar variability (1650)
SC: SPA-Solar and Heliospheric Physics [SH]
MN: 2007 Fall Meeting