Multi-station Scintillation Observations at Spitzbergen During the NASA Cusp Rocket Campaign

Details Multi-station Scintillation Observations at Spitzbergen During the NASA Cusp Rocket Campaign Multi-station Scintillation Observations at Spitzbergen During the NASA Cusp Rocket Campaign

Dec 2003

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2003agufmsm12a1208b&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2003, abstract #SM12A-1208

Physics

2411 Electric Fields (2712), 2431 Ionosphere/Magnetosphere Interactions (2736), 2439 Ionospheric Irregularities, 2463 Plasma Convection

Scientific paper

The plasma density irregularities and their turbulent motion in the cusp following the launch of the NASA Cusp Rocket on December 14, 2002, were studied by the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) from ionospheric scintillation observations by using transmissions from a quasi-stationary satellite at 250 MHz and GPS at 1.5 GHz. The multi-instrumented rocket was launched from Ny Alesund at 11h 16m 48s and the rocket attained 300 km altitude after 2m 27s into the flight and reached its apogee at 760 km after 8m 8s. At this time the 300 km sub-ionospheric locations of UHF scintillation measurements from Ny Alesund (75 MLAT) and from Longyearbyen (74.1 MLAT) on Spitzbergen corresponded closely to the rocket flight path. Scintillations were in a quiescent phase earlier that day, becoming suddenly enhanced to saturation levels prior to 1100 UT and maintaining this increase up to 1250 UT. The rocket was launched during this active phase when a burst of GPS phase fluctuations was also observed. The most significant result was the broadening of the scintillation spectrum at 250 MHz that exceeded 2 Hz indicating at least a 5-fold increase in the turbulent motion of plasma density irregularities compared to that prior to the scintillation enhancement. The enhancement of scintillation was coincident with the enhanced plasma convection and radar backscatter recorded by the SuperDARN radars at Iceland and Finland. The increased spectral width of the backscatter return from these two radars indicating turbulent electric fields agreed very well with that obtained from the broadening of the power spectrum of scintillations. The rocket in-situ observations of electric field fluctuations and plasma density irregularities are being studied in relation to the magnitude of scintillations and their spectra.

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