Electrodynamics of the ionosphere

We review various important studies in the field of electrodynamics of the ionosphere. Four topics are presented; (1) conductivity, (2) wind and the dynamo theory, (3) drift and its effect on the ionosphere formation and (4) interaction between wind and electromagnetic field.We point out some important future problems. They are: (1) We need to consider in the dynamo theory of the geomagnetic daily variation the connection of the ionosphere of both hemispheres by lines of force of the geomagnetic field. (2) Non-periodic wind may be important for producing electric field. (3) Drift to cause interchange of ionization contained in tubes of the geomagnetic field lines, and diffusion of ionization in these tubes control dynamic behaviours of the F2 region. (4) Interaction between wind and electric current presents a new problem. (5) The ionosphere and the magnetosphere react to each other.     

Magnetic storms and associated phenomena

This review will not merely be a précis of the literature in this field though a partial survey is attempted. A critical stand will be taken and a point of view put forward. Experiments to test this point of view and others will be suggested. Several new ideas are introduced.Two broad conditions of the magnetosphere are discussed, the quiet and the disturbed. During the quiet condition, the polar cap F region either glows red or is filled with a family of red auroral arcs parallel roughly to L-contours. Auroras near the auroral zone have an increasing amount of green (5577) coloration. The ionospheric F region exists even in winter over the polar caps despite the absence of solar ionizing radiation or obvious corpuscular bombardment. The red polar glow and the maintenance of the quiet polar winter F region are suggested to be accounted for by the cooling of plasma in the geomagnetic tail. These phenomena consume less than 0.01 of the energy and flux of the solar wind impinging on the magnetosphere. The relevance of dynamo theory to this quiet condition is discussed.During the disturbed condition, many phenomena such as polar magnetic substorms, auroral substorms, the sudden appearance of islands of energetic particles in the magnetosphere, and the rapid acceleration of auroral particles appear to call for the operation of an instability deep in the magnetosphere.The energetics of various facets of geomagnetic disturbance are discussed, and joule dissipation of ionospheric current is found to be a major sink of energy during storms. This causes significant heating of the ionosphere particularly at the site of auroral electrojets. Corpuscular bombardment may consume as much energy, but its heating effect is likely to be less.The stable auroral red arc (SAR-arc) observed equatorwards of normal active aurora during magnetic storms is a major sink of energy of a magnetospheric ring current. It is contended that the ring current generally consists of particles of energy of less than a few keV. It is suggested that the ring current is caused by the irreversible pumping and energisation of plasma from the outer to the inner magnetosphere. This pumping is achieved by the random electrostatic fields associated with the noisy component of geomagnetic disturbance. The SAR-arc must be a major feature of ring current theory.The consumption of energy in polar magnetic and auroral substorms, during a complete storm, is tentatively concluded to be far greater than that of the ring current. The ring current is considered to be a byproduct of magnetic disturbance on higher L-shells.The main phase of a storm should be considered, in storm analysis, as a separate entity from the initial phase, for physically they bear a tenuous and unpredictable relationship to one another. A new system of analysis is proposed in which the onset of geomagnetic noise rather than sudden commencement is taken as the origin of time, both for magnetic and ionospheric storms. This will enable analysis of storms with both gradual and sudden commencements to be made on a common basis.No reliable evidence is found to support the contention that magnetic storms are caused dominantly by neutral H-atoms ejected from the sun. In fact much evidence can be amassed to deny this hypothesis.     

On optimal aerodynamic attitude control of spacecraft

Attitude control of spin-stabilized satellites by means of aerodynamic forces is investigated. A controller employing two rotatable control surfaces is proposed to control the roll-yaw motions of the spacecraft spin-axis. Optimal control theory is applied to synthesize a feedback control law for the control surface rotations which leads to asymptotically stable controller operation. The system response is interpreted in terms of performance criteria such as the maximum control surface excursions, the speed of response and the associated orbital energy loss due to drag. Even with a moderate size, the controller appears quite effective in maintaining the spacecraft attitude against external disturbances.     

A Lower Bound to Rcomp for the Gaussian Channel with a Uniform Quantizing Demodulator

Consideration is given to a channel using orthogonal modulation, soft decision-uniform quantizing demodulation, and perturbed by additive white Gaussian noise. A lower bound is derived to the Rcomp of this channel. The bound explicity exhibits the dependence upon the degree of quantization and is easily computable. It also indicates that the uniform quantizing demodulation scheme is close to optimum for sufficiently fine quantization.     

High-Resolution Imaging of Tropospheric Radio Scatterers

A two-dimensional matched filter technique is described for processing ing the signal from a pulsed coherent troposcatter link to obtain high crosspath resolution "maps" showing the relative positions of individual scatterers. For a typical tropolink (station displacement 200 km; midpath beam halfwidth 2 km; wavelength 0.3 meters) crosspath resolution is about 4.5 meters under perfect conditions. Vertical resolution is inversely proportional to scatterer height, but even for wide bandwidth signals is never better than hundreds of meters. Slight velocity mismatches between the signal and filter degrade crosspath resolution considerably so that the scatterers' velocity must be known accurately a priori. Crosspath resolution is relatively insensitive to mismatch in signal and filter record lengths. Random fluctuations of the velocity of a scatterer seriously degrade crosspath resolution. For the typical tropolink parameters and with a 10 m/s scatterer crosspath velocity and a 0.2 m/s standard deviation ion fluctuation the crosspath resolution degrades by an order of magnitude. It is concluded that the matched filter imaging scheme will produce images of individual scatterers if specific atmospheric conditions ions exist. The best results are obtained if the received signal comes from a single scattering layer at a known height, with scatterers moving at a known constant horizontal velocity, with no along-path or vertical components. Such a layer would be observed during night time or early morning when convective and mixing processes are at a minimum.     

The Gyrolite: A New Generation Synchronous Satellite

A typical GYROLITE spacecraft recently designed by this author is described. It is shown that, for the satellite to have a stable attitude, the spinning part must have a favorable inertia ratio.     

Phase Detector Response to Noisy and Noisy Fading Signals

Transfer characteristics of sinusoidal, triangular, and sawtooth-type phase detectors in response to noisy and noisy fading signals have been studied in detail. A new analytical model of the swatooth-type phase detector has been suggested. Detailed experimental results have been supplemented in support of the theoretical findings. Both the theoretical findings and the experimental results clearly indicate that the superiority of a sawtooth-type phase detector over the other two varieties is completely lost in noisy and noisy fading environments.     

Signal Interference and Improvement of Signal-to-Noise Ratios in a Half-Wave Linear Detector

Signal interference in the half-wave linear detector has been studied only for amplitude modulation. In this paper, we treat signal interference for both an amplitude-and an angle-modulation communication system. The input to the half-wave linear detector is assumed to be composed of an amplitude-modulated wave, an angle-modulated wave, and narrow-band Gaussian noise. In particular, when strongweak relations exist in the input processes, a detailed analysis for the output component is presented to clarify some useful output properties.     

Remote sensing of precipitation by a satellite-borne microwave remote sensor

The problem of remote sensing of precipitation by a satellite-borne microwave rain scatterometer is discussed. A downward-looking scanning pencil-beam antenna system is used. The combination of the range-gate method and low side lobe level is used to separate echoes from precipitation layers in the main lobe from ground clutter in the side lobes. Various parameters of the satellite-borne microwave rain scatterometer are calculated and characteristics of systems at 10 and 34.45 GHz are considered. The transmitter peak power needed to observe precipitation with sufficient signal-to noise ratio is calculated by means of the radar equation. The signal (i.e. the received power from the resolution volume of the precipitation) and the received power due to the ground clutter are calculated and the signal-to-clutter ratio is obtained by applying the radar equation. An airborne microwave rain scatterometer is proposed for preliminary experiments.