Need of multispacecraft observations to understand collisionless turbulent solar system plasmas

Understanding the turbulence of collisionless space plasmas is one a major open frontiers towards the disclosure of the mechanisms of energization of the plasmas of the Universe, the acceleration of particles and bulk plasma flows, the heating of the plasma.

The interacting plasma particles and multiscale modes of the plasma turbulence form a system of complex nonlinear interactions which cannot be described analytically.

Instead, their behavior is investigated statistically, by means of kinetic numerical simulations.

We report the current state of the art of these simulations which revealed the important role of the electrons even for larger (ion-) scale processes in the collisionless turbulence.

Based on those new results we derive the necessity and parameters of future multispacecraft investigations of spectra and structure formation processes in turbulent space plasmas beyond the results obtained by CLUSTER and MMS observations.