Near Magnetic Field Investigation,Instrumentation, Spacecraft Magnetics and Data Access

The primary objective of the investigation is the search for a body-wide magnetic field of the near Earth asteroid Eros. The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) 3-axis fluxgate magnetometer includes a sensor mounted on the high-gain antenna feed structure. The NEAR Magnetic Facility Instrument (MFI) is a joint hardware effort between GSFC and APL. The design and magnetics approach achieved by the NEAR MFI effort entailed low-cost, up-front attention to engineering solutions which did not impact the schedule. The goal of the magnetometer is reliable magnetic field measurements within 5 nT, which necessitates the use of an extensive spacecraft magnetic interference model but is achievable with the full year's orbital data set. Such a goal has been shown viable with recent in-flight calibration data and comparisons to the WIND magnetometer data. The NEAR MFI effort has succeeded in providing magnetic field measurements for the first flight in NASA's Discovery line.     

Field-aligned (Birkeland) currents

Following earlier suggestions of Edmond Halley and Anders Celsius for the magnetic behavior of auroral phenomena, Kristian Birkeland discovered in his polar expeditions of 1902–03 that large-scale electric currents were associated with the aurora. He was also the first to suggest that these currents originated far from earth and that they flowed into the upper polar atmosphere and out of it along magnetic field lines; the existence of such field-aligned currents was widely disputed until satellite and rocket-borne instruments confirmed their permanent existence. The importance of these Birkeland currents to the coupling between the magnetosphere and the polar ionosphere is emphasized by their intensity, which ranges between 10⁶ and 10⁷ amperes, and by the energy which they dissipate in the upper atmosphere, which can exceed by a considerable factor the energy dissipated there by auroral particles. The large- and small-scale average properties of field-aligned currents, determined from spacecraft observations, are reviewed here.     

Observations of low-energy electrons from AE-C in the south polar cusp during the geomagnetic storm of September 21, 1977

The AE-C spacecraft skimmed through the southern polar cusp at a 400 km altitude during a large geomagnetic storm on September 21, 1977. This period has been designated as a special IMS period, and the AE-C data were acquired close to the times that data were acquired by the DMSP satellite at nearly the same location over the southern polar cap, and by the GEOS satellite located near the noon-meridian in the northern hemisphere. Low energy electrons (1-500 eV) were measured with the photoelectron spectrometer experiment experiment onboard AE-C. This instrument was operated in the mode which measured precipitating electron fluxes and backscattered electron fluxes in alternating 4s intervals with two sensors. A region of intense precipitating electron fluxes was observed near 0924 UT on September 21, 1977 extending from 69 degree invariant latitude at 1100 MLT to 72 degree invariant latitude at 1152 MLT. From the spectra of the precipitating electrons, this region is identified as the southern polar cusp. Since the K _p equals 7- during this time, the displacement of the cusp down to these low latitudes is not unreasonable. Particle data obtained from the DMSP satellite on orbits close to AE-C, confirm that the position of the cusp was rapidly changing during this period, and was displaced to latitudes equatorward of the quiet time position. A second region of intense fluxes of precipitating electron was observed by AE-C at approximately 0933 UT from 69 degree invariant latitude near 1700 MLT to 66 degree invariant latitude near 1730 MLT. This region of low energy electron fluxes is characterized by slightly harder energy spectra and is interpreted as being the afternoon auroral zone. The remarkable and fortunate location of the AE-C, DMSP, and GEOS spacecraft during this special IMS period will allow future correlative studies aimed at the determination of the shape of the magnetosphere during very disturbed conditions.