Modeling Planetary Magnetospheres

Members of the space environment modeling group at the University of Washington use 3D multi-fluid modeling to simulate the solar wind interaction with the terrestrial and many other planetary magnetospheres throughout the solar system.

Winglee Lab Denizens:

• Robert Winglee, Professor and Chair, Dept. of Earth and Space Sciences
• Erika Harnett, Research Assistant Professor, Dept. of Earth and Space Sciences

  Current and former graduate students:

• Michele Cash
• Ariah Kidder
• Moon-Young Choi
• Darci Snowden
• Carol Paty
• Sean Matt

Planetary Magnetospheres Research

Flux Rope Generation at Mercury

Modeling of the terrestrial magnetosphere

Mini-magnetospheres on the Moon

Modeling the solar wind interaction with magnetic anomalies at Mars

Jupiter-Io coupled model

Ganymede's UV aurora, and interpretation of ion energy spectrograms

Centrifugal interchange at Saturn

Asymmetric ion pickup at Titan

Coupled simulations of Saturn's magnetosphere with Titan

Multi-fluid comparison to hybrid simulations at Pluto