Global Measurement of Birkeland Currents with Iridium: How it Works and Future Prospects

Details Global Measurement of Birkeland Currents with Iridium: How it Works and Future Prospects Global Measurement of Birkeland Currents with Iridium: How it Works and Future Prospects

Dec 2006

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2006agufmsm14a..03a&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2006, abstract #SM14A-03

Other

2409 Current Systems (2721), 2721 Field-Aligned Currents And Current Systems (2409), 2784 Solar Wind/Magnetosphere Interactions, 2788 Magnetic Storms And Substorms (7954)

Scientific paper

The constellation of more than 70 Iridium satellites offers an unprecedented opportunity to observe the global Birkeland currents. These currents convey stress between the magnetosphere and ionosphere and reflect the state of the M-I system. Each satellite of the Iridium constellation carries a magnetometer as part of the attitude control system and is digitized to 30 nT resolution. The Iridium engineering data stream captures these data for telemetry to the ground once every three minutes from each satellite. Even with this relatively coarse time sampling the data have proven particularly effective in specifying the location and intensity of the large-scale Birkeland currents. The techniques used to inter-calibrate, de-trend, identify noise signals are discussed. The analysis techniques developed to derive Birkeland current distributions without making any assumptions regarding the geometry of the currents or ionospheric conductances are also discussed. Comparisons with numerous independent data sets confirm that the results are accurate to within the Nyquist resolution limits of the input data, in particular that the Iridium-derived magnetic perturbations agree with other low altitude satellites and that the derived upward current regions correspond very well with auroral emissions attributed to electron precipitation. A concept has been developed to increase the volume of magnetic field data returned from the satellites yielding up to 100 times better time resolution. This upgrade would allow determination of the Birkeland current system with a 9 minute cadence and dramatically improved accuracy.

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