Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission Observations in the Most Sensitive Portion of the Magnetosphere: The Dynamic Near Earth Magnetotail at Low Latitudes
Thursday, October 1, 2015
Cong Zhao1, Christopher T Russell1, Robert J Strangeway2, Brian J Anderson3, Wolfgang Baumjohann4, Kenneth R Bromund5, Mark Chutter6, David Fischer7, Larry Kepko8, Guan Le9, Olivier Le Contel10, Hannes Karl Leinweber11, Werner Magnes7, Rumi Nakamura12, Ferdinand Plaschke13, James A Slavin14 and Roy B Torbert15, (1)University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, United States, (2)University of California Los Angeles, IGPP/EPSS, Los Angeles, CA, United States, (3)Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, United States, (4)Austrian Academy of Sciences, Graz, Austria, (5)NASA/GSFC, Greenbelt, MD, United States, (6)University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH, United States, (7)Space Research Institute, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Graz, Austria, (8)NASA GSFC, Greenbelt, MD, United States, (9)NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, United States, (10)Laboratoire de Physique des Plasmas, Paris, France, (11)Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, United States, (12)Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, Austria, (13)IWF ÖAW, Graz, Austria, (14)University of Michigan Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor, MI, United States, (15)Univ New Hampshire, Durham, NH, United States
Abstract:
The terrestrial magnetosphere has been crisscrossed by spacecraft at all latitudes, distances and local times. But few spacecraft, and especially no closely-separated multi-spacecraft mission, has lingered in the equatorial magnetosphere near 12 Re for a significant period of time. In this region the near-Earth stretching that precedes substorm occurrence and the sudden inrush of magnetized plasma, originally named the inward moving compression, but now called the dipolarization front, are found. The four MMS spacecraft clearly record the dynamics of this region in their detection of the varying inter-spacecraft gradients, which allows us to study the evolution of the magnetic configuration that precedes the substorm.
