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The Local-Time Variation Of The Quiet Plasmasphere: Geosynchronous Observations And Kinetic Theory, Mark Anthony Reynolds, G. Ganguli, Y-J Su, M.F. Thomsen

Publications

The quiet-time structure of the plasmaspheric density was investigated using observations of the Los Alamos geosynchronous satellites, and these observations were compared with theoretical predictions of the quasi-static localtime variation by a kinetic model. It was found that the coupling to the ionosphere (via the local-time variation of the exobase) played a key role in determining the density structure at 6.6 RE. The kinetic model predicts that most of the local-time variation at geosynchronous orbit is due to the variation of the exobase parameters. During quiet times, when the convection electric field is dominated by the corotation field, the effects …