Remote Gyrosensing of the Earth's Bow Shock

We examine the possibility of remotely sensing Earth’s bow shock location, orientation, and velocity, via gyrosensing the plasma ions reflected from the shock. In this work, we present a remote gyrosensing approach to quantifying the bow shock properties for various interplanetary magnetic field orientations by analyzing reflected particles with different gyrophases and pitch angles. Then we suggest an analytical formalism for predicting the bow shock characteristics based on the azimuthal and zenith look angles of the reflected ions as observed by ElectroStatic Analyzers (ESA) on a single probe near the bow shock. The proposed method will be tested and verified with FPI ion instrument measurements onboard Magnetospheric MultiScale (MMS) spacecraft.