Compositional Variability of the Solar Wind: The Need for an Ultra-High Temporal Resolution Mass Spectrometer for Studies of Solar Wind and Coronal Mass Ejection Boundaries

Details Compositional Variability of the Solar Wind: The Need for an Ultra-High Temporal Resolution Mass Spectrometer for Studies of Solar Wind and Coronal Mass Ejection Boundaries Compositional Variability of the Solar Wind: The Need for an Ultra-High Temporal Resolution Mass Spectrometer for Studies of Solar Wind and Coronal Mass Ejection Boundaries

May 2004

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2004agusmsh21a..03a&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Spring Meeting 2004, abstract #SH21A-03

Physics

7507 Chromosphere, 7513 Coronal Mass Ejections, 7531 Prominence Eruptions, 7537 Solar And Stellar Variability, 7594 Instruments And Techniques

Scientific paper

Current state-of-the-art solar wind mass spectroscopy has clearly demonstrated the compositional uniqueness between slow/fast solar wind streams and slow/fast coronal mass ejections (CMEs). As such, solar wind composition measurements serve as an indicator of the sub-coronal and coronal processes responsible for the formation of these heliospheric features. While current instrumentation have identified temporal variations in solar wind/CME composition on the order of 10's of minutes, these detections have occurred during relatively quiescent periods, such as within the magnetic cloud portion of a CME, when temporal variations of the collective solar wind (including magnetic field variations) occur over periods in excess of the current minimum instrumental duty cycle of 5-minutes. Consequently, the compositional markers of the microphysics responsible for the formation of highly variable solar wind flows and for CME/prominence formation remain overlooked. To address the need for greater temporal resolution in solar wind compositional measurements, we have undertaken the development of a novel ultra-high temporal resolution ion mass spectrometer utilizing a helical ion path time-of-flight (TOF) system within a compact, low-mass, low-power instrument. The instrument is designed specifically to measure solar wind 3He+2 < M/q < 56Fe+6 ion plasmas from 0.3-20.0 keV/q with an order of magnitude greater geometric factor than current solar wind ion mass spectrometers, and produce 1-10 ms mass spectra with a mass resolution of M/Δ M ~ 200 or greater, all within a duty cycle of < 90-s. These characteristics achieve a resolution sufficient to probe spatial/temporal dimensions down to an ion gyroradius in solar wind flow boundaries at 1 AU. This paper presents an overview of solar wind mass spectroscopy results to date, justification for solar wind composition measurements of greater temporal resolution, and an introduction to the helical ion path mass spectrometer (HIPS) instrument under development.

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