Ionospheric plasma structuring and its impact on GNSS signals: unprecedented opportunities using NorSat-1

Abstract:

On July 14th, 2017, the first Norwegian scientific satellite NorSat-1 was launched into a high-inclination (98^∘), low-Earth orbit (600 km altitude) from Baikonur, Kazakhstan. As part of the payload package, NorSat-1 carries the multi-needle Langmuir probe (m-NLP) instrument which is capable of sampling the electron density at a rate up to 1 kHz. Here we present characteristics of meter-scale ionospheric plasma density structures obtained from the m-NLP instrument and study their impact on signals from global navigation satellite systems. We focus on the northern high latitude region and find that the cusp region is consistently the region with the highest amount of ionospheric small-scale structure. While the level of structuring is independent of the amount of solar wind/magnetosphere coupling, the size of the cusp region varies under the influence of geomagnetic activity. We also study the amount of ionospheric structure occurring on the nightside in relation to magnetic substorms. The m-NLP instrument on board NorSat-1 gives us the unprecedented opportunity to map the spatial occurrence of ionospheric meter-scale plasma density variations, investigate the processes that produce ionospheric structuring, and study the impacts of such structures on GNSS signals.