SH43A-2419
DSCOVR Observations of Magnetic Reconnection
Thursday, 17 December 2015
Poster Hall (Moscone South)
Anthony W Case1, Michael Louis Stevens1, Justin Christophe Kasper2, Adam Szabo3, Andriy Koval3 and Douglas Alan Biesecker4, (1)Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, Cambridge, MA, United States, (2)University of Michigan Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor, MI, United States, (3)NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, United States, (4)NOAA Boulder, SWPC, Boulder, CO, United States
Abstract:
The Deep-Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) contains the PlasMag suite of instruments that makes fast measurements of solar wind plasma, including ion velocity distribution functions (VDF) at 1 Hz resolution, and magnetic field at 50 Hz. These instruments routinely sample the ion VDF and magnetic field at resolutions similar to the convected ion gyroradius and ion inertial length. These measurements provide an unprecedented view of magnetic reconnection on ion kinetic scales. Here we report the first DSCOVR observations of magnetic reconnection on kinetic ion scales in the solar wind. We report the size distribution and occurrence frequency of reconnection exhausts, and provide examples of typical heating and acceleration of ions in the exhausts. These results will be valuable for quantifying the importance of reconnection in heating ions in the solar wind.
