Multiscale analysis of a current sheet embedded in a fast earthward flow during a substorm event detected by MMS
- 1Laboratoire de Physique des Plasmas, CNRS/Ecole Polytechnique IP Paris/Sorbonne Université/Université Paris Saclay/Observatoire de Paris, Paris, France (olivier.lecontel@lpp.polytechnique.fr)
- 2Space Research Institute, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Graz, Austria
- 3Department of Earth Observation, European Space Agency, ESRIN, Frascati, Italy
- 4Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie, Toulouse, France
- 5Departamento Electromagnetismo and Electronica, Universidad de Murcia, Murcia, Spain
- 6Space and Atmospheric Physics, Department of Physics Blackett Laboratory, Imperial College, London, UK
- 7Space Science Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley, USA
- 8NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, USA
- 9Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio, USA
- 10Laboratory of Atmospheric and Space Physics, Boulder, USA
- 11Swedish Institute of Space Physics, Uppsala, Sweden
- 12Space Science Center and Department of Physics, University of New Hampshire, Durham, USA
- 13School of Electronic Information, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China
- *A full list of authors appears at the end of the abstract
In July 2017, the MMS constellation was evolving in the magnetotail with an apogee of 25 Earth radii and an average inter-satellite distance of 10 km (i.e. at electron scales). On 23 rd of July around 16:19 UT, MMS was located at the edge of the current sheet which was in a quasi-static state. Then, MMS
suddenly entered in the central plasma sheet and detected the local onset of a small substorm as indicated by the AE index (~400 nT). Fast earthward plasma flows were measured for about 1 hour starting with a period of quasi-steady flow and followed by a saw-tooth like series of plasma jets (“bursty bulk flows”). In the present study, we focus on a short sequence related to an ion scale current sheet crossing embedded in a fast earthward flow. We analyse in detail two other kinetic structures in the vicinity of this current sheet: an ion-scale flux rope and an electron vortex magnetic hole and discuss the Ohm’s law and conversion energy processes.
J. L. Burch (9), R. B. Torbert (12), B. J. Giles (8), P.-A. Lindqvist (14), R. E. Ergun (10), Y. Khotyaintsev (11) F. D. Wilder (15), D. L. Turner (16), I. J. Cohen (16), H. Wei (17), R. J. Strangeway (17), K. R. Bromund (8), F. Plaschke (2)
How to cite: Le Contel, O., Retino, A., Alexandrova, A., Nakamura, R., Alqeeq, S., Chust, T., Mirioni, L., Catapano, F., Jacquey, C., Toledo, S., Stawarz, J., Goodrich, K., Gershman, D. J., Fuselier, S. A., Mukherjee, J., Ahmadi, N., Graham, D., Argall, M., Fischer, D., and Huang, S. and the MMS team: Multiscale analysis of a current sheet embedded in a fast earthward flow during a substorm event detected by MMS, EGU General Assembly 2021, online, 19–30 Apr 2021, EGU21-14350, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu21-14350, 2021.
