Mapping Saturn's Nightside Plasma Sheet Using Cassini's Proximal Orbits

Evidence for periodic variations in the thickness of Saturn's nightside plasma sheet

During certain portions of the Cassini mission to Saturn, Cassini made repeated and periodic crossings of the magnetospheric current sheet that lies near the magnetic equator and extends well down the magnetospheric tail. These repeated crossings are part of the puzzling set of planetary period variations in numerous magnetospheric properties that have been discovered at Saturn. During 2010 the...

Global Ice Sheet Mapping Observatory

Evidence that solar wind fluctuations substantially affect global convection and substorm occurrence

[1] We have used examples of Poker Flat and Sondrestrom incoherent-scatter radar observations of flows within the ionospheric mapping of the nightside plasma sheet and of Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms (THEMIS) spacecraft observations within the nightside plasma sheet to investigate whether the features found in the companion paper by Kim et al. (2009) withi...

The Plasma Sheet Source Groove

A test particle study of the ionospheric source of plasma in the EarthÕs plasma sheet has been performed, in an effort to understand an apparent inconsistency between the results of forward and backward (in time) test particle calculations. Most if not all forward calculations of polar wind ion outflows result in energetic plasma sheet ion populations; yet most if not all backward trajectory ca...

On Jovian Plasma Sheet Structure

We evaluate several models of Jovian plasma sheet structure by determining how well they organize several aspects of the observed Voyager 2 magnetic field characteristics as a function of Jovicentric radial distance. The present study focuses exclusively on the data from the Voyager 2 spacecraft because the magnetosphere was more stable during that flyby than it was during the Pioneer 10 and Vo...