Observations of Terrestrial Polar Wind Outflows and Their Short Term Variability

Details Observations of Terrestrial Polar Wind Outflows and Their Short Term Variability Observations of Terrestrial Polar Wind Outflows and Their Short Term Variability

May 2001

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2001agusm..sm52d04p&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Spring Meeting 2001, abstract #SM52D-04

Physics

2481 Topside Ionosphere, 2736 Magnetosphere/Ionosphere Interactions, 2776 Polar Cap Phenomena

Scientific paper

It is becoming widely understood that polar and auroral ionospheric outflows are likely to be very important in magnetospheric dynamics. The Thermal Ion Dynamics (TIDE) instrument on Polar has systematically collected observations of terrestrial polar wind outflows since the northern spring of 1996. The observations have not been continuous, however. Best observations of terrestrial polar wind outflows are available when the Polar Plasma Source Instrument (PSI) is operating. PSI reduces Polar spacecraft potentials to the vicinity of 1 V, thereby providing access of the 10s of eV/q polar wind flow at Polar apogee to be observed. When PSI is not operating, the Polar spacecraft typically floats at an electrostatic potential of some 10s of volts positive with respect to the local plasma, so that observation of polar wind outflow (in this low density lobe environment) is severely limited. The duty cycle of the PSI was somewhat less than 10% during the interval 1997 - 1999. Nevertheless, a substantial observation set with PSI operating is in hand. We present here an initial report on the exploration of this data set, to include description of a database containing typical properties of the polar wind outflow as observed while PSI operates. Measured polar wind properties to be reported will include, outward flux, directed and thermal energy, composition, and the short term variability in these quantities.

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