Abstract
In 1989, during its first three elliptical orbits around Mars, the Phobos-2 spacecraft observed significant plasma and magnetic field perturbations near the crossings of the orbit of the Martian moon Phobos. They are commonly considered as indirect evidence for the presence of a dust torus along the Phobos orbit, first predicted by Sloter ( CRSR 462, 1971), but not yet observed directly. It is the purpose of this paper to test this hypothesis. To this end, the solar wind interaction with a charged dust column is studied on the basis of a Hall-MHD/fully kinetic plasma description, and the results are compared with observations. The events are suggested to be the signatures of crossings of a fast magnetosonic/whistler Mach cone originating from a dust obstacle with a disk-like cross-section. To reproduce typical features of the observed perturbations, a shift of the obstacle centre from the Phobos orbit radially outwards by about 1000 km and a peak charge density of at least of the order of the solar wind density are required.
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