September 21, 2018, 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm

October 19, 2018, 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm, SED Director's Seminar, Hosted by the Heliophysics Science Division's Space Weather Laboratory (674)

Imag(in)ing the Magnetosphere in Soft X-rays

David Sibeck

Understanding the nature of the solar wind's interaction with the Earth's magnetosphere is a task central to Heliophysics. Understanding the microphysics of reconnection motivated the recent launch of the highly successful MMS mission. Reconnection also has global signatures. Reconnection erodes the dayside magnetopause and transfers magnetic flux to the magnetotail. Reconnection within the magnetotail triggers substorms and returns magnetic flux to the dayside magnetosphere. By tracking the motion of the magnetopause we can learn a lot about the conditions that facilitate magnetic reconnection and its properties. Recent advances in technology make magnetopause imaging possible using wide field-of-view telescopes capable of imaging the soft X-rays generated when high charge state solar wind ions encounter the Earth?s outer atmosphere at the magnetopause. GSFC has the lead in developing this technology. This talk present results to date and future steps. .

Flux transfer event observed in the Earth's dayside magnetopause

Marcos Silveira

Magnetic reconnection is a fundamental phenomenon in plasma physics and it is defined as a topological restructuring of magnetic fields due to changes in magnetic connectivity. In the Earth's magnetosphere, magnetic reconnection is responsible for mass, energy, and momentum exchange between the magnetosphere and solar wind. Its consequences can be observed as a disturbance of plasma convection, injection of particles into high-latitude ionosphere, and magnetic field variations measured on the ground. Flux transfer events (FTEs) have been interpreted as a result of transient magnetic reconnection and they are observed in the vicinity of the Earth's magnetopause. We present MMS observations of magnetopause crossing and a magnetosheath excursion with magnetic field signatures of the smallest (electron-scale) flux transfer event observed thus far.

Burcu Kosar