EGU2020-9760
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-9760
EGU General Assembly 2020
© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

The effect of plasmaspheric material on magnetopause reconnection

Stephen Fuselier1,2, Stein Haaland3, Paul Tenfjord3, David Malaspina4, James Burch1, Michael Denton5, Barbara Giles6, Karlheinz Trattner4, Steven Petrinec7, Robert Strangeway8, and Sergio Toledo-Redondo9
Stephen Fuselier et al.
  • 1Southwest Research Institute, Space Sciences and Engineering, San Antonio, United States of America (sfuselier@swri.edu; Jburch@swri.edu)
  • 2University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio, TX, United States (sfuselier@swri.edu)
  • 3University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway (stein.haaland@ift.uib.no; paul.tenfjord@uib.no)
  • 4Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, United States (karlheinz.trattner@lasp.colorado.edu, David.Malaspina@lasp.colorado.edu)
  • 5Space Science Institute, Boulder, CO, USA (mdenton@spacescience.org)
  • 6Goddard Space Flight center, Greenbelt, MD, USA (barbara.giles@nasa.gov)
  • 7Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center, Palo Alto, CA, USA (steven.m.petrinec@lmco.com)
  • 8University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA (strange@igpp.ucla.edu)
  • 9Universidad de Murcia, Murcia, Spain (sergio.toledo@um.es)

The Earth’s plasmasphere contains cold (~eV energy) dense (>100 cm-3) plasma of ionospheric origin. The primary ion constituents of the plasmasphere are H+ and He+, and a lower concentration of O+. The outer part of the plasmasphere, especially on the duskside of the Earth, drains away into the dayside outer magnetosphere when geomagnetic activity increases. Because of its high density and low temperature, this plasma has the potential to modify magnetic reconnection at the magnetopause. To investigate the effect of plasmaspheric material at the magnetopause, Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) data are surveyed to identify magnetopause crossings with the highest He+densities. Plasma wave, ion, and ion composition data are used to determine densities and mass densities of this plasmaspheric material and the magnetosheath plasma adjacent to the magnetopause. These measurements are combined with magnetic field measurements to determine how the highest density plasmaspheric material in the MMS era may affect reconnection at the magnetopause.

How to cite: Fuselier, S., Haaland, S., Tenfjord, P., Malaspina, D., Burch, J., Denton, M., Giles, B., Trattner, K., Petrinec, S., Strangeway, R., and Toledo-Redondo, S.: The effect of plasmaspheric material on magnetopause reconnection, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-9760, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-9760, 2020