Hot oxygen corona at Mars and the photochemical escape of oxygen: Improved description of the thermosphere, ionosphere, and exosphere

The Mars Adaptive Mesh Particle Simulator model is coupled with the Mars Global Ionosphere Thermosphere Model for the first time to provide an improved description of the Martian hot O corona based on our modeling studies of O-2(+) dissociative recombination. A total of 12 cases comprising three solar activity levels and four orbital positions is considered to study the solar cycle and seasonal variability. The newly coupled framework includes two additional thermospheric species and adopts a realistic forward scattering scheme using the angular differential cross sections. We present the effects of these changes on the resulting hot O corona and escape rate. A comparison between the simulated hot O corona and the recent observations from the ALICE/Rosetta instrument showed a reasonable agreement, considering the large uncertainties in the data. We assume that some discrepancies near the transition altitude may be originated from the averaging over the altitude range, where the cold and hot O densities become comparable. The revised O escape rates by our new coupled framework range from similar to 1.21 x 10(25) s(-1) to similar to 5.43 x 10(25) s(-1).