Abstract

Ionosphere Up flow near the Earth Space and the Terrestrial mass balance

The review of the mass balance outflow of ions and neutrals from the ionosphere and upper atmosphere of earth includes, and the inflow of meteoroids and larger objects. The focus is on ions with energies less than tens of eV originating from the ionosphere. This technique is to detect the wake behind a charged spacecraft in a supersonic ion flow observed based on low-energy ions. We found that the outflow flux in large volumes in the magnetosphere and the low energy ions dominate the ion density. The global outflow is of the order of 1026 ions s–1 . This is a significant fraction of the total number outflow of particles from Earth, and alters the plasma processes in near- Earth space. The order of magnitude estimates of the mass outflow and inflow for planet Earth are compared and find that they are similar, at around 1.5 kg s−1 (30 000 ton yr−1 ). We briefly discuss atmospheric and ionospheric outflow from other planets and the connection to evolution of extra-terrestrial life


Author(s): S E Milan

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