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The Atmospheric Radiation Interaction Simulator (AtRIS): Description and Validation
Author(s) -
Banjac Saša,
Herbst Konstantin,
Heber Bernd
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
journal of geophysical research: space physics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2169-9402
pISSN - 2169-9380
DOI - 10.1029/2018ja026042
Subject(s) - atmosphere (unit) , physics , planet , radiative transfer , computational physics , aerospace engineering , astrobiology , meteorology , astronomy , optics , engineering
We present the Atmospheric Radiation Interaction Simulator (AtRIS), a newly developed GEANT4‐based code tailored specifically to enable parametric studies of radiation propagation through various (exo)planetary atmospheres. Its main purpose is to model the altitude‐dependent atmospheric secondary particle environment and to calculate the ion pair production rates, which are a mandatory input for atmospheric chemistry models in order to, for example, directly characterize the habitability of the modeled planet. Similar codes have been developed previously (e.g., PLANETOCOSMICS; Desorgher, et al., [Desorgher, L., 2006]); however, until now, none possesses the necessary flexibility in the specification of the atmosphere and the regolith that is necessary to model planets outside our solar system. Here we provide a detailed description of AtRIS and its validation against earthbound measurements. For validation, we show comparisons against Earth measurements. Thereby, the focus is on the atmospheric altitude‐dependent ionization, the surface muon, and the neutron fluxes, as well as the primary proton fluxes. Furthermore, a comparison of the computed energy losses of monoenergetic protons based on AtRIS and PLANETOCOSMICS is shown. Our aim is to demonstrate the validity of AtRIS and its importance for future studies on, for example, potential (Earth‐like) exoplanets.