Basics Of The Solar Wind

The Sun continually ejects matter into space, blowing a huge bubble of supersonic plasma. This solar wind bathes the whole solar system and shapes all planetary environments. The growth of space technology has considerably increased our knowledge of this medium. This 2007 book presents an introduction to the subject, starting with basic principles and including all the latest advances from space exploration and theory. It contains a short introduction to plasma physics and discusses the structure of the solar interior and atmosphere, the production of solar wind and its perturbations. It explains the objects of the Solar System, from dust to comets and planets, and their interaction with the solar wind. The final sections explore the astrophysical point of view. The topics are treated at various levels of difficulty both qualitatively and quantitatively. This book will appeal to graduate students and researchers in earth and atmospheric sciences, and astrophysics.

For upper-division undergraduate and first-year graduate students.

Little more than ten years have passed since spaceprobe-borne instruments con clusively demonstrated the existence of the solar wind. These observations con firmed the basic validity of a theoretical model, first proposed by E. N. Parker, predicting a continuous, rapid expansion of the solar corona. The subsequent decade has seen a tremendous growth in both the breadth and sophistication of solar wind observations; the properties of the interplanetary plasma near the orbit of the earth are now known in great detail. The theory of the coronal ex pansion has also been highly refilled both in the sense of including additional physical processes, and of treating more realistic (time-dependent and non spheri cally-symmetric) coronal boundary conditions. The present volume is an attempt to synthesize the solar wind observations and coronal expansion models from this decade of rapid development. The ultimate goal is, of course, the interpretation of observed solar wind phenomena as the effects of basic physical processes occurring in the coronal and interplanetary plasma and as the natural manifestations of solar properties and structures. This approach implies an emphasis upon the "large-scale" features revealed by the observations. It requires extensive use of the concepts and methods of fluid mechanics.

Contributors examine the physics of wind origin and physical phenomena in winds, including heliospheric shocks, magnetohydrodynamic turbulence, and kinetic phenomena--and their interactions with surrounding media. Contributions range from studies of the interstellar cloud surrounding the solar system to solar wind interaction with comets.

Never HIGHLIGHT a Book Again Includes all testable terms, concepts, persons, places, and events. Cram101 Just the FACTS101 studyguides gives all of the outlines, highlights, and quizzes for your textbook with optional online comprehensive practice tests. Only Cram101 is Textbook Specific. Accompanies: 9780872893795. This item is printed on demand.

Humanity has long been fascinated by the planet Mars. Was its climate ever conducive to life? What is the atmosphere like today and why did it change so dramatically over time? Eleven spacecraft have successfully flown to Mars since the Viking mission of the 1970s and early 1980s. These orbiters, landers and rovers have generated vast amounts of data that now span a Martian decade (roughly eighteen years). This new volume brings together the many new ideas about the atmosphere and climate system that have emerged, including the complex interplay of the volatile and dust cycles, the atmosphere-surface interactions that connect them over time, and the diversity of the planet's environment and its complex history. Including tutorials and explanations of complicated ideas, students, researchers and non-specialists alike are able to use this resource to gain a thorough and up-to-date understanding of this most Earth-like of planetary neighbours.

Never HIGHLIGHT a Book Again! Virtually all of the testable terms, concepts, persons, places, and events from the textbook are included. Cram101 Just the FACTS101 studyguides give all of the outlines, highlights, notes, and quizzes for your textbook with optional online comprehensive practice tests. Only Cram101 is Textbook Specific. Accompanys: 9781107407459 .

"Parker's model of a spherically expanding corona, the "solar wind," is compared with D.E. Blackwell's observations of the 1954 minimum equatorial corona. A significant discrepancy is found between the predicted and the observed electron densities at distances from the sun greater than 20 solar radii. Blackwell's data are found to be consistent with a model in which the corona expands mostly within a disk less than 25 solar radii thick, lying within the sun's equatorial plane. The thickness of the disk as a function of distance from the sun is qualitatively explained in terms of magnetic pressure. The solar wind is found to have a considerable effect on the lunar atmosphere. First, the calculated density of the lunar atmosphere is greatly reduced by collisions with protons in the solar wind. If the flux of particles in this wind has the conventional values ranging between 10(exp 10) to 10(exp 11) per sq cm-sec, the calculations yield a lunar pressure of 10(exp -13) atmosphere of argon, in agreement with the value predicted by Elsmore and Whitfield on the basis of observations on the occultation of radio stars. Second, following a suggestion by Gold, it was found that the collisions of solar-wind protons with the lunar surface produce an atmosphere of cold neutral hydrogen with a density of 10(exp 5) per cu cm at the lunar surface. The density falls off at greater distances in accordance with the inverse-square law. Estimates indicate that the interaction of solar particles with the neutral hydrogen will produce an extended lunar ionosphere with a density of the order of 400 protons/cu cm in the vicinity of the moon."

In 2010, NASA and the National Science Foundation asked the National Research Council to assemble a committee of experts to develop an integrated national strategy that would guide agency investments in solar and space physics for the years 2013-2022. That strategy, the result of nearly 2 years of effort by the survey committee, which worked with more than 100 scientists and engineers on eight supporting study panels, is presented in the 2013 publication, Solar and Space Physics: A Science for a Technological Society. This booklet, designed to be accessible to a broader audience of policymakers and the interested public, summarizes the content of that report.