First Observations of Convective Flows in the Dusk-side Equatorial Magnetosphere by MMS
Tuesday, September 29, 2015
Matthew R Argall1, Hiroshi Matsui1, Roy B Torbert2, Hans Vaith3, Richard Messeder1, Per-Arne Lindqvist4, Goran Tage Marklund5, Robert E Ergun6, Yuri V Khotyaintsev7, Olivier Le Contel8, C. T. Russell9, Werner Magnes10 and Robert J Strangeway9, (1)University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH, United States, (2)Univ New Hampshire, Durham, NH, United States, (3)University of New Hampshire Main Campus, Durham, NH, United States, (4)KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, (5)Royal Inst Technology, KTH/EES, Stockholm, Sweden, (6)University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, United States, (7)IRF Swedish Institute of Space Physics Uppsala, Uppsala, Sweden, (8)Laboratoire de Physique des Plasmas (UMR7648), CNRS/Ecole Polytechnique/UPMC/Univ. Paris Sud/Obs. de Paris, Paris, France, (9)University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, United States, (10)Space Research Institute, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Graz, Austria
Abstract:
Energy is transported throughout magnetosphere by various convective processes. Convection is driven by the Dungey reconnection cycle, during which the magnetospheric field lines reconnect with those of the interstellar magnetic field, are transported to the magnetotail, and may reconnect. These field lines then convect back to the dayside. Within this flow, dipolarization fronts, accompanied by bursty bulk flows, couple to the ionosphere via the substorm current wedge. The electron drift instrument (EDI) onboard the MMS satellites can measure the electric field perpendicular to B and the convection ExB drift velocity. We combine the EDI data with those of the 3D electric field measurements from the electric field double probes, and magnetic field data from a combined fluxgate and search-coil data product, to provide measurements of the subauroral ion drift (SAID) and the subauroral polarization streams (SAPS). A close conjunction of Van Allen Probes and MMS on 12 June 2015, provides an opportunity to have 6-point measurements of these phenomena.
