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Elsevier, Planetary and Space Science, 14-15(57), p. 2132-2134, 2009

DOI: 10.1016/j.pss.2009.09.012

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Extremely high reflection of solar wind protons as neutral hydrogen atoms from regolith in space

Journal article published in 2009 by Martin Wieser, Stas Barabash, Yoshifumi Futaana ORCID, Mats Holmström, Anil Bhardwaj ORCID, R. Sridharan, M. B. Dhanya, Peter Wurz, Audrey Schaufelberger, Kazushi Asamura
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This paper is available in a repository.

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Abstract

We report on measurements of extremely high reflection rates of solar wind particles from regolith-covered lunar surfaces. Measurements by the Sub-keV Atom Reflecting Analyzer (SARA) instrument on the Indian Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft in orbit around the Moon show that up to 20% of the impinging solar wind protons are reflected from the lunar surface back to space as neutral hydrogen atoms. This finding, generally applicable to regolith-covered atmosphereless bodies, invalidates the widely accepted assumption that regolith almost completely absorbs the impinging solar wind.