Imaging a geomagnetic storm with energetic neutral atoms

✍ Scribed by J.D. Perez; M.-C. Fok; T.E. Moore

• Book ID: 104406985
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2000
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 562 KB
• Volume: 62
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1364-6826
• DOI: 10.1016/s1364-6826(00)00037-7

✦ Synopsis

The ring current during a geomagnetic storm on May 2, 1986 has been modeled using a bounce averaged kinetic equations for the phase space density of hydrogen ions, considering charge exchange and Coulomb losses along the drift path. The resulting equatorial pitch angle distribution is used to generate data simulating the medium and high energy neutral atom imagers to be ¯own on IMAGE. A method for deconvolving these images is described and applied to the simulated data. The results show that, when there are sucient counts, the deconvolved distribution contains the main features of the original source and that the energy spectrum at a speci®c time as well as the total energy of the ring current as a function of time can be extracted from the energetic neutral atom images.