Anatomy of Hot Flow Anomaly Shocks and Their Effectiveness for Energetic Particle Acceleration

Turner, Drew

Anatomy of Hot Flow Anomaly Shocks and Their Effectiveness for Energetic Particle Acceleration

Monday, 10 July 2017: 13:30

Furong Room (Cynn Hotel)

Drew L Turner¹, Steven J Schwartz², Lynn B Wilson III³, Adnane Osmane⁴, Joseph F. Fennell⁵, J Bernard Blake⁵, Allison N Jaynes⁶, Ian Cohen⁷, Barry Mauk⁷, Daniel J Gershman⁸, Levon A Avanov³, Barbara L Giles³, Katherine Goodrich⁹, Robert J Strangeway¹⁰, Roy B Torbert¹¹ and James L Burch¹², (1)The Aerospace Corp, Los Angeles, CA, United States, (2)Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom, (3)NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, United States, (4)Aalto University, Aalto, Finland, (5)The Aerospace Corporation, Los Angeles, CA, United States, (6)University of Colorado at Boulder, LASP, Boulder, CO, United States, (7)Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, MD, United States, (8)University of Maryland College Park, College Park, MD, United States, (9)University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, CO, United States, (10)University of California Los Angeles, Earth, Planetary, and Space Sciences, Los Angeles, CA, United States, (11)University of New Hampshire Main Campus, Durham, NH, United States, (12)Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio, TX, United States

Abstract:

NASA's Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission has now finished two passes through the dayside of Earth's magnetosphere. During these dayside passes, when the magnetosphere was compressed under fast solar wind, the four identically instrumented spacecraft captured several periods of observations from within the ion foreshock. From those periods, multiple foreshock transient events were captured in burst mode by the MMS Scientists in the Loop, offering unprecedented multipoint observations and resolution of plasma, energetic particles, and electric and magnetic fields and waves. In this presentation, we analyze in detail the anatomy of well-developed hot flow anomalies (HFAs) captured with burst resolution data. In particular, we focus on: 1) the nature of the fast magnetosonic shock and wave activity that form at the upstream edge of HFAs and 2) how HFA shocks may play a role in the acceleration of energetic particles, i.e. >1 to 100s of keV electrons and protons, via shock acceleration processes and shock-shock interactions between the HFA shock and Earth's bow shock. The results of this study are of interest to previous studies of foreshock transients from missions such as THEMIS and Cluster, are relevant to the dayside science objectives of the MMS extended mission, and may have implications for energetic particle acceleration at other astrophysical shocks throughout the Universe.