“Formation of Venus Plasma Clouds and Streamers” by Wolff and Norman
Conference:
SIGGRAPH Video Review:
Track:
- 37
Title:
- Formation of Venus Plasma Clouds and Streamers
Director(s):
Company / Institution / Agency:
- Apple Computer Inc.
- National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA)
Description:
This is a visualization of a numerical simulation of the solar wind excavating the ionosphere of Venus. The solar wind is a hot (100.000K). Tenuous, magnetized plasma;the ionosphere is a cold (25,000K), dense, unmagnetized plasma. The wind flows initially at 100 km/sec (250,000 mph). The simulation employs the 2-D ZEUS magneto hydrodynamic code developed by Mike Norman of NCSA, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. It is on a 300 x 300 grid with 5 km uniformly spaced grid points and took about 10 hours on the Cray X-MP at NCSA. Thirty thousand timesteps were computed for a total of 30 GB of data. The visualization technique, first employed in this animation, was developed at NCSA by Matt Arrott and Stefen Fangmeier and represents parameters with shaded-relief and color. This approach allows study of the correlation of events between parameters as well as the small scale features. The research partially funded by the NASA Planetary Atmospheres program and Apple Computer, was performed as part of the NCSA Scientific Visualization Program. Post production was done at Pacific Data Images.
