Citation: | Jung, J., Connor, H., Dimmock, A., Sembay, S., Read, A., and Soucek, J. (2024). Mshpy23: a user-friendly, parameterized model of magnetosheath conditions. Earth Planet. Phys., 8(1), 89–104. doi: 10.26464/epp2023065 |
Lunar Environment heliospheric X-ray Imager (LEXI) and Solar wind−Magnetosphere−Ionosphere Link Explorer (SMILE) will observe magnetosheath and its boundary motion in soft X-rays for understanding magnetopause reconnection modes under various solar wind conditions after their respective launches in 2024 and 2025. Magnetosheath conditions, namely, plasma density, velocity, and temperature, are key parameters for predicting and analyzing soft X-ray images from the LEXI and SMILE missions. We developed a user-friendly model of magnetosheath that parameterizes number density, velocity, temperature, and magnetic field by utilizing the global Magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) model as well as the pre-existing gas-dynamic and analytic models. Using this parameterized magnetosheath model, scientists can easily reconstruct expected soft X-ray images and utilize them for analysis of observed images of LEXI and SMILE without simulating the complicated global magnetosphere models. First, we created an MHD-based magnetosheath model by running a total of 14 OpenGGCM global MHD simulations under 7 solar wind densities (1, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, and 30 cm