Abstract
The plasma sources of Mercury, Earth, Jupiter, and Saturn have been described in this issue in great detail. Much less information exists about the plasma sources of Uranus and Neptune. Only one flyby of the Voyager 2 spacecraft through the highly complex and time variable magnetospheres of those ice giants gives us a limited snapshot of the main plasma sources in those systems. The basic knowledge derived from those flybys are described briefly in this paper for completeness. The main purpose of this paper is to summarize the plasma sources of all planetary magnetospheres and compare the similarities and differences of those huge plasma laboratories in our solar system.
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Acknowledgements
This work was in part financed by the German BMWi through the German Space Agency DLR under contracts 50 OH 0301, 50 OH 0801, 50 OH 0802, 50 OH 1101, 50 OH 1502, 50 ON 0201, 50 QW 0503, 50 QW 1303, 50 QJ 1301, 50 OO 1206, 50 OO 1002 and by the Max Planck Society. This work was also supported by the European Research Infrastructure EUROPLANET RI in the framework program FP7, contract number: 001637.
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Krupp, N. Comparison of Plasma Sources in Solar System Magnetospheres. Space Sci Rev 192, 285–295 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11214-015-0176-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11214-015-0176-5