Abstract
Mirror mode structures are born from a plasma instability driven by a
large temperature anisotropy and appear downstream of planetary and
interplanetary shocks, in their magnetosheath. As magnetic bottles
imprisoning dense and hot plasma, they are usually observed downstream
of their region of formation, where the anisotropy is large and free
energy is available, implying that they are advected with the plasma
flow to the detection region. At Earth and other planets, the
quasi-perpendicular shock provides the plasma with the necessary heating
along the perpendicular direction to the local magnetic field. At Mars,
which boasts an extended exosphere, an additional source of temperature
anisotropy exists, through unstable ring-beam velocity distributions,
that is, through ions locally ionised and subsequently picked up by the
local electric fields. We report here for the first time an example of
near locally-generated mirror mode structures at Mars using the full
plasma instrument suite on board the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile
EvolutioN (MAVEN) mission. We present three events in
quasi-perpendicular and quasi-parallel shock conditions with a variable
exosphere, discuss the locality of the mirror modes excited and show
that, in addition to the classic quasi-perpendicular source of
anisotropy, another source exists, that is, unstable pickup protons. The
existence at Mars of this extra ion anisotropy-generating mechanism is
reminiscent of comets.