Publication Date:
2018-08-17
Description:
The Arase spacecraft is capable of observing ultralow frequency waves in the inner magnetosphere at intermediate magnetic latitudes, a region sparsely covered by previous spacecraft missions. We report a series of impulsively excited fundamental toroidal mode standing Alfvén waves in the midnight sector observed by Arase outside the plasmasphere at magnetic latitudes 13–24°. The wave onsets are concurrent with Pi2 onsets detected by the Van Allen Probe B spacecraft at the magnetic equator in the duskside plasmasphere and by ground magnetometers at low latitudes. The duration of each toroidal wave packet is ∼20 min, which is much longer than that of the corresponding Pi2 wave packet. The toroidal waves cannot be the source of high-latitude Pi2 waves because they were not detected on the ground near the magnetic field footprint of Arase. Overall, the toroidal wave event lasted more than 2 hr and allowed us to use the wave frequency to estimate the plasma mass density at L = 6.1–8.3. The mass density (in amu/cm3) is higher than the electron density (cm−3) by a factor of ∼6, which implies that 17–33% of the ions were O+. ©2018. American Geophysical Union. All Rights Reserved.
Print ISSN:
0094-8276
Electronic ISSN:
1944-8007
Topics:
Geosciences
,
Physics