Rotation of a Magnetic Cloud: MESSENGER and STEREO-B Observations

Abstract:

Magnetic clouds are a magnetically well ordered subset of CMEs observed in interplanetary space. We report observations of the same magnetic cloud made by the MESSENGER spacecraft at Mercury (then at 0.44 AU) and later by STEREO-B at 1.09 AU, while the two spacecraft were radially aligned in November 2011. Observation with two radially aligned spacecraft allows sampling of approximately the same region of a magnetic cloud, and so allows any evolution that may have occurred within that region during propagation between the two spacecraft to be determined. The flux rope within the November 2011 cloud has been analysed using force-free fitting and minimum variance analysis: it has been estimated that the rope axis rotated from an inclination of approximately 25° relative to the solar equatorial plane at MESSENGER to lie within a few degrees of the plane at STEREO-B. We investigate the hypothesis that this rotation and alignment with the solar equatorial plane is driven by interactions of the cloud with the heliospheric current sheet.