Hot oxygen in the exosphere of Venus

It has now been firmly established from both theoretical calculations and observations, that the exospheres of the terrestrial planets have extended coronas of translational energetic oxygen atoms. The current model generally accepted as the source of these hot atoms is the dissociative recombination of OZ, that is, O-2(+) + e(-) –> O* + O* where the product O* atoms are translationally energetic. The determination of the extent of this population of superthermal atoms is an important endeavor. The present paper considers a simple model based on the Boltzmann equation for the energy and altitude dependence of the oxygen atom distribution function. The density and temperature distributions are determined with this distribution.