First MMS measurements of the High Frequency Magnetic Waves
Friday, October 2, 2015: 3:00 PM
Olivier Le Contel1, Alain Roux1, Laurent Mirioni1, Alessandro Retino1, Fouad Sahraoui1, Benoit Lavraud2, Nicolas Aunai1, Paul Leroy1, Malik Mansour1, Dominique Alison1, James L Burch3, Roy B Torbert4, Robert E Ergun5, David Summers5, Jerry Needell4, Mark Chutter6, David Rau4, Ivan Dors4, Christopher T Russell7, Werner Magnes8, Robert J Strangeway7, Kenneth R Bromund9, Ferdinand Plaschke10, David Fischer8, Hannes Karl Leinweber11, Brian J Anderson12, Matthew R Argall13, Guan Le14, James A Slavin15, Larry Kepko9, Wolfgang Baumjohann8, Per-Arne Lindqvist16, Yuri V Khotyaintsev17, Goran Tage Marklund18, Rumi Nakamura19, Craig J Pollock14, Barry Mauk20 and Stephen A Fuselier3, (1)Laboratoire de Physique des Plasmas (UMR7648), CNRS/Ecole Polytechnique/UPMC/Univ. Paris Sud/Obs. de Paris, Paris, France, (2)IRAP, Toulouse, France, (3)Southwest Research Institute San Antonio, San Antonio, TX, United States, (4)Univ New Hampshire, Durham, NH, United States, (5)University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, United States, (6)University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH, United States, (7)University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, United States, (8)Space Research Institute, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Graz, Austria, (9)NASA/GSFC, Greenbelt, MD, United States, (10)IWF ÖAW, Graz, Austria, (11)Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, United States, (12)Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, United States, (13)University of New Hampshire Main Campus, Durham, NH, United States, (14)NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, United States, (15)University of Michigan Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor, MI, United States, (16)KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, (17)IRF Swedish Institute of Space Physics Uppsala, Uppsala, Sweden, (18)Royal Inst Technology, KTH/EES, Stockholm, Sweden, (19)Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, Austria, (20)Applied Physics Laboratory Johns Hopkins, Laurel, MD, United States
Abstract:
The MMS mission was successfully launched on March 13, 2015 into an equatorial, highly elliptical orbit with a low altitude perigee and an apogee of 12 earth radii. Each satellite is equipped by a search-coil magnetometer (SCM) which measures the three components of the magnetic field fluctuations with a nominal frequency range from 1 Hz to 6 kHz. During the past months of the commissioning phase, the SCM waveforms have usually been gathered at 128 or 256 samples per second (S/s). Yet in a few cases, burst data corresponding to 8192 S/s were obtained. Since the launch, the orbit apogee has moved from dawn to dusk. These various conditions allow us to present high frequency wave measurements and wave polarization analysis in the dawn magnetosphere flank as well as associated with local and global dipolarization events in the night side. Furthermore, the SCM is not saturated due to a large amplitude spin modulation even at perigee since the MMS spin frequency is low (50 mHz). Thanks to the onboard spectra computed by the digital signal processor, we are able to continuously monitor the magnetic wave activity through the full SCM frequency range all along the orbit and notably in the radiation belt region. Thus some typical figures of the wave activity in the inner magnetosphere are also briefly described.
