Stochastic models of hot planetary and satellite coronas: A photochemical source of hot oxygen in the upper atmosphere of Mars

The processes of the kinetics and transport of hot oxygen atoms in the upper atmosphere of Mars are studied. A reaction of dissociative recombination of the main ionospheric ion O₂⁺ with thermal electrons is considered as a photochemical source of suprathermal oxygen atoms. Oxygen atoms are formed in the dissociative recombination reaction with an excess of kinetic energy of about 0.4–4 eV and lose that energy in elastic and inelastic collisions with the ambient thermal atmospheric gas. The altitude distributions of the concentrations of neutral and ionized components, as well as their temperatures, were taken from Krasnopolsky (2002). Unlike the models published earlier, detailed calculations of the formation, collisional kinetics, and transport of suprathermal oxygen atoms in the thermosphere-exosphere transition region of the upper atmosphere of Mars have been made for the first time. For this, we used a stochastic model of the formation of a hot planetary corona (Shematovich, 2004). It has been shown that the considered photochemical source of suprathermal oxygen leads to the formation of the hot corona and to higher nonthermal losses of oxygen from the upper atmosphere of Mars due to escape fluxes. The detailed energy spectra of the fluxes of suprathermal atomic oxygen were calculated for the thermosphere-exosphere transition region of the Martian atmosphere.Translated from Astronomicheskii Vestnik, Vol. 39, No. 1, 2005, pp. 26–37.Original Russian Text Copyright © 2005 by Krestyanikova, Shematovich.