  This paper presents the state of the art of kinetic modeling techniques for
simulating plasma kinetic dynamics in magnetospheres. We describe the critical
numerical techniques for enabling large-scale kinetic simulations of
magnetospheres: parameter scaling, implicit Particle-in-Cell schemes, and
fluid-kinetic coupling. We show an application of these techniques to study
particle acceleration and heating in asymmetric magnetic reconnection in the
Ganymede magnetosphere.
