Simultaneous Comparison of Birkeland Currents from the Northern and Southern Hemispheres using the Iridium Constellation

Details Simultaneous Comparison of Birkeland Currents from the Northern and Southern Hemispheres using the Iridium Constellation Simultaneous Comparison of Birkeland Currents from the Northern and Southern Hemispheres using the Iridium Constellation

Dec 2009

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2009agufmsm31a1513d&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2009, abstract #SM31A-1513

Physics

[2407] Ionosphere / Auroral Ionosphere, [2409] Ionosphere / Current Systems, [2721] Magnetospheric Physics / Field-Aligned Currents And Current Systems

Scientific paper

The Iridium satellite constellation consists of 72 satellites in 780 km altitude polar orbits which are distributed over six equally-spaced-longitudinal planes. The system provides magnetic field measurements in both hemispheres with comparable coverage such that these data could in principle provide simultaneous determination of Birkeland currents in both hemispheres. Existing processing of the Iridium engineering data to derive Birkeland currents uses only the cross-track magnetic field component. This limitation has been particularly deleterious for current inversions near the orbit crossing point, because residual noise in cross-track signals results in spurious currents between orbit tracks. This is a serious problem for Birkeland current inversions for the southern hemisphere because the location of the magnetic pole in the southern hemisphere places the orbit crossing point near or in the auroral zone (for moderately active conditions). This has made quantitative comparisons between currents in the northern and southern hemispheres difficult. However, The Active Magnetosphere and Planetary Electrodynamics Response Experiment (AMPERE) project is now in development which increases the quantity of Iridium magnetic field samples telemetered to the ground by two orders of magnitude, allowing determination of currents every nine minutes. As part of the AMPERE development, the Iridium magnetic field data processing has been improved to allow use of the full vector magnetic perturbation in deriving the currents. This is expected to relieve the orbit-crossing-point noise problem. We present the first initial results using both an improved processing of the historical Iridium data, and using new high-rate (2 and 20 second sampling) test data acquired during AMPERE development.

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