Kaguya observation of the ion acceleration around a lunar crustal magnetic anomaly

Abstract

We investigate Kaguya observation of ion acceleration around a lunar crustal magnetic anomaly located in the South Pole-Aitken basin at an altitude of 100km. The accelerated ions in the 230eV to 1.5keV energy range were identified by a characteristic dispersion signature in the energy-time spectrogram that appeared repeatedly upon Kaguya׳s approach to the magnetic anomaly. The interplanetary magnetic field was almost parallel to the solar wind velocity and thus the electric field was very small. The results of our analysis show that ions with energies below 230eV were accelerated up to 1.5keV by an electric field produced by the interaction between the solar wind and the magnetic anomaly. We argue that the low-energy ions mainly originated from the solar wind ions with energies of 450eV that were backscattered on the lunar surface.