The Importance of Exploring Neptune’s Aurora and Ionosphere

Whitepaper #261 submitted to the Planetary Science and Astrobiology Decadal Survey 2023-2032. Topics: atmospheric/exospheric evolution; giant planets systems Neptune’s aurorae are some of the least well understood within the entire solar system. Observing them with in-situ space missions will greatly improve our understanding of the aurorae and their atmospheric and magnetospheric context, and will provide a new understanding of all Ice Giant aurorae, both within the solar system and around other stars

A pre-shock event at Jupiter on 30 January 2001

International audienceIn this paper we analyze a pre-shock event that we observed in the foot region of the quasi-parallel bow shock (BS) that the Cassini spacecraft crossed on 30 January 2001, at about 1030 UT. Before crossing the BS, the incoming solar wind first decelerated, and then the bulk velocity both of the proton and α components increased, the flow accelerated and decelerated, heated and cooled several times. We characterize the plasma in the foot using the data measured by the magnetometer, the radio and plasma wave science (RPWS) instrument, and the Cassini plasma spectrometer (CAPS) being carried onboard the Cassini spacecraft, and analyze the observations. We argue that the velocity and temperature changes can be caused by firehose instabilities excited by ions reflected from the shock. We investigate another possibility, shocklet formation, to account for the observed features, but conclude that this explanation seems to be less likely. In the foot we also identified both backstreaming electrons and ions and electrostatic waves in the 100-1000 Hz range very likely excited by the backstreaming electrons