Ion cyclotron waves at unmagnetized bodies: a comparison of Mars, Venus and Titan

Mars, Venus and Titan do not have appreciable global magnetic fields. Their high-altitude neutral atmospheres are not shielded from being lost to the solar wind and the Saturnian magnetosphere. When the atmospheric hydrogen atoms of Mars and Venus are ionized and picked up by the solar wind, proton cyclotron waves are created from the free energy of the ring-beam distribution of the pick-up ions. At Mars, proton cyclotron waves observed by Mars Global Surveyor extend from the magnetosheath to over 12 Mars radii, with intermittent occurrence and amplitudes slowly varying with distance. The wave occurrence pattern indicates a disk-shaped hydrogen exosphere of Mars with asymmetry in the direction of the interplanetary electric field. Fast neutrals produced by neutralization of the pickup ions can travel across fieldlines to distant regions where they get re-ionized and produce waves far downstream. Thus the top of Mars exosphere extends in a disk to high altitude, with its orientation controlled by the interplanetary magnetic field. At Venus, plasma waves having properties similar to ion cyclotron waves are observed in the solar wind around the planet by Venus Express, with wave frequencies that range from 0.2 to 5.9 times of the proton gyrofrequency. Statistical study shows that the waves with frequency higher than 1.5 times the proton gyrofrequency are not generated locally and are similar to the waves observed at 0.3 AU and 1 AU which appear to be created near the Sun and convected outward with the solar wind. The rest of the waves are mostly magnetically connected to the bow shock, so they are probably generated by particles backstreaming from the shock and propagate out further from the foreshock. At Titan, ion cyclotron waves are not observed although wave generation is expected due to the large pickup rate of hydrocarbon ions at high altitude of Titan. We attempt to understand the lack of ion cyclotron waves at Titan using hybrid simulations. Studying and comparing the ion cyclotron waves at Mars, Venus and Titan allow us to estimate their atmospheric loss through the pickup process.