Turbulence in the Solar Photosphere

The precise nature of photospheric flows, and of the transport effects they give rise to, has been the subject of intense debate in the last decade. Here we attempt to give a brief review of the subject emphasizing interdisciplinary (solar physics–turbulence theory) aspects, key open questions, and recent developments.     

Cosmic Ray Transport in a Heliospheric Magnetic Field with Non-Polar Coronal Holes

The simple tilted dipole picture of Corotating Interaction Regions which prevailed during the first polar pass of Ulysses no longer applies since the Sun entered a more active phase. Recent observations show that CIRs still persist, though the large polar coronal holes of solar minimum shrink to smaller areas and move to lower latitudes. We present 3-D simulations for the cosmic-ray intensity variations in a model with non-polar high speed streams. Latitudinal and recurrent time-variations are discussed, but more detailed and realistic simulations are required before quantitative comparisons with observations can be made. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Ion Acoustic Waves in the Heliosphere

Observations of ion acoustic waves in the solar wind during the first and second orbit of the Ulysses spacecraft are presented. The observations show variations of the wave activity with the heliolatitude and with the phase of the solar cycle. The interrelationships between the wave intensity and the electron heat flux and the ratio of electron to proton temperature, T _e/T _p, are examined. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

The FAST Satellite Fields Instrument

We describe the electric field sensors and electric and magnetic field signal processing on the FAST (Fast Auroral SnapshoT) satellite. The FAST satellite was designed to make high time resolution observations of particles and electromagnetic fields in the auroral zone to study small-scale plasma interactions in the auroral acceleration region. The DC and AC electric fields are measured with three-axis dipole antennas with 56 m, 8 m, and 5 m baselines. A three-axis flux-gate magnetometer measures the DC magnetic field and a three-axis search coil measures the AC magnetic field. A central signal processing system receives all signals from the electric and magnetic field sensors. Spectral coverage is from DC to 4 MHz. There are several types of processed data. Survey data are continuous over the auroral zone and have full-orbit coverage for fluxgate magnetometer data. Burst data include a few minutes of a selected region of the auroral zone at the highest time resolution. A subset of the burst data, high speed burst memory data, are waveform data at 2×10⁶ sample s^–1. Electric field and magnetic field data are primarily waveforms and power spectral density as a function of frequency and time. There are also various types of focused data processing, including cross-spectral analysis, fine-frequency plasma wave tracking, high-frequency polarity measurement, and wave-particle correlations.     

The 3-D Heliosphere from the Ulysses and ACE Solar Wind Ion Composition Experiments

The source region of solar wind plasma is observed to be directly reflected in the compositional pattern of both elemental and charge state compositions. Slow solar wind associated with streamers shows higher freeze-in temperatures and larger FIP enhancements than coronal hole associated wind. Also, the variability of virtually all compositional parameters is much higher for slow solar wind compared to coronal hole associated wind. We show that these compositional patterns persist even though stream-stream interactions complicate the identification based on in situ plasma parameters. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

The Heliospheric Magnetic Field at Solar Maximum: Ulysses Observations

At solar maximum, the large-scale structure of the heliospheric magnetic field (HMF) reflects the complexity of the Sun's coronal magnetic fields. The corona is characterised by mostly closed magnetic structures and short-lived, small coronal holes. The axis of the Sun's dipole field is close to the solar equator; there are also important contributions from the higher order terms. This complex and variable coronal magnetic configuration leads to a much increased variability in the HMF on all time scales, at all latitudes. The transition from solar minimum to solar maximum conditions, as reflected in the HMF, is described, as observed by Ulysses during its passage to high southern heliolatitudes. The magnetic signatures associated with the interaction regions generated by short-lived fast solar wind streams are presented, together with the highly disordered period in mid-1999 when there was a considerable reorganisation in coronal structures. The magnetic sector structure at high heliolatitudes shows, from mid-1999, a recognisable two-sector structure, corresponding to a highly inclined Heliospheric Current Sheet. A preliminary investigation of the radial component of the magnetic field indicates that it remains, on average, constant as a function of heliolatitude. Intervals of highly Alfvénic fluctuations in the rarefaction regions trailing the interaction regions have been, even if intermittently, identified even close to solar maximum. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Rigidity Dependence and Time Response of Cosmic Rays to the Modulation Steps in the Rising Part of Solar Cycle 23. Cospin/ket Results

Previous work on the latitudinal gradient and on the amplitude of the recurrent cosmic ray decreases, has shown that their magnitude does not decrease monotonically with the particle rigidity, but it presents a broad maximun around 1–2 GV. We have extended this analysis to study the behaviour of cosmic-ray particles during the modulation steps in the rising part of the solar activity of the present Solar cycle. We found that the ‘depth’ of the modulation step decreases monotonically with increasing rigidity and that the least energetic particles are the last to reach their minimum intensity value. We also considered in this analysis electrons of equal rigidity to study the influence of the charge sign on the particle behaviour during the modulation steps. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Ring Currents and Internal Plasma Sources

The discovery of terrestrial O⁺ and other heavy ions in magnetospheric hot plasmas, combined with the association of energetic ionospheric outflows with geomagnetic activity, led to the conclusion that increasing geomagnetic activity is responsible for filling the magnetosphere with ionospheric plasma. Recently it has been discovered that a major source of ionospheric heavy ion plasma outflow is responsive to the earliest impact of coronal mass ejecta upon the dayside ionosphere. Thus a large increase in ionospheric outflows begins promptly during the initial phase of geomagnetic storms, and is already present during the main phase development of such storms. We hypothesize that enhancement of the internal source of plasma actually supports the transition from substorm enhancements of aurora to storm-time ring current development in the inner magnetosphere. Other planets known to have ring current-like plasmas also have substantial internal sources of plasma, notably Jupiter and Saturn. One planet having a small magnetosphere, but very little internal source of plasma, is Mercury. Observations suggest that Mercury has substorms, but are ambiguous with regard to the possibility of magnetic storms of the planet. The Messenger mission to Mercury should provide an interesting test of our hypothesis. Mercury should support at most a modest ring current if its internal plasma source is as small as is currently believed. If substantiated, this hypothesis would support a general conclusion that the magnetospheric inflationary response is a characteristic of magnetospheres with substantial internal plasma sources. We quantitatively define this hypothesis and pose it as a problem in comparative magnetospheres.     

SAR ATR performance using a conditionally Gaussian model

A family of conditionally Gaussian signal models for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery is presented, extending a related class of models developed for high resolution radar range profiles. This signal model is robust with respect to the variations of the complex-valued radar signals due to the coherent combination of returns from scatterers as those scatterers move through relative distances on the order of a wavelength of the transmitted signal (target speckle). The target type and the relative orientations of the sensor, target, and ground plane parameterize the conditionally Gaussian model. Based upon this model, algorithms to jointly estimate both the target type and pose are developed. Performance results for both target pose estimation and target recognition are presented for publicly released data from the MSTAR program     

Comparison of two measurement fusion methods forKalman-filter-based multisensor data fusion

Currently there exist two commonly used measurement fusion methods for Kalman-filter-based multisensor data fusion. The first (Method I) simply merges the multisensor data through the observation vector of the Kalman filter, whereas the second (Method II) combines the multisensor data based on a minimum-mean-square-error criterion. This paper, based on an analysis of the fused state estimate covariances of the two measurement fusion methods, shows that the two measurement fusion methods are functionally equivalent if the sensors used for data fusion, with different and independent noise characteristics, have identical measurement matrices. Also presented are simulation results on state estimation using the two measurement fusion methods, followed by the analysis of the computational advantages of each method