Space Physics
The Limb-imaging Ionospheric and Thermospheric Extreme-ultraviolet Spectrograph (LITES) experiment is one of thirteen instruments aboard the Space Test Program Houston 5 (STP-H5) payload on the International Space Station. Along with the…
The design, integration, testing, and launch of the first Finnish satellite Aalto-1 is briefly presented in this paper. Aalto-1, a three-unit CubeSat, launched into Sun-synchronous polar orbit at an altitude of approximately 500 km, is…
In a previous paper, we found that proton temperatures are clearly associated with the proton-scale turbulence in the solar wind, and magnetic helicity signature appears to be an important indicator in the association. Based on 15 years of…
Muon detectors and neutron monitors were recently installed at Syowa Station, in the Antarctic, to observe different types of secondary particles resulting from cosmic ray interactions simultaneously from the same location. Continuing…
The Effective Acceleration Model (EAM) predicts the Time-of-Arrival (ToA) of the Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) driven shock and the average speed within the sheath at 1 AU. The model is based on the assumption that the ambient solar wind…
This work presents, for the first time, the analysis of the occurrence of ionospheric irregularities during geomagnetic storms at Tucum\'an-Argentina, a low latitude station in the Southern American longitudinal sector ( 26.9 {\deg} S,…
Mars has been successfully explored by various space firms. Globally, 44 mission attempts were made, lamentably 26 encountered setbacks. There have been instances where a trivial error in the progressive accomplishment of spaceflight…
Magnetic nulls are ubiquitous in space plasmas, and are of interest as sites of localized energy dissipation or magnetic reconnection. As such, a number of methods have been proposed for detecting nulls in both simulation data and in situ…
The paper presents a new method for deriving turbulent heating of the solar wind using plasma moments and magnetic field data. We develop the method and then apply it to compute the turbulent heating of the solar wind proton plasma at 1AU.…
Motivated by low-altitude cusp observations of small-scale (~ 1 km) field-aligned currents (SSFACs) interpreted as ionospheric Alfv\'en resonator modes, we investigated the effects of Alfv\'en wave energy deposition on thermospheric…
The Satellite for Orbital Aerodynamics Research (SOAR) is a CubeSat mission, due to be launched in 2021, to investigate the interaction between different materials and the atmospheric flow regime in very low Earth orbits (VLEO). Improving…
Renewed interest in Very Low Earth Orbits (VLEO) - i.e. altitudes below 450 km - has led to an increased demand for accurate environment characterisation and aerodynamic force prediction. While the former requires knowledge of the…
We combine different measurements of the polytropic index of the proton plasma in the heliosphere: i) near-adiabatic index in the inner heliosphere ~1AU, ii) subadiabatic indices in the outer heliosphere ~20-40AU, and iii) near-zero indices…
Collisionless shocks heat electrons in the solar wind, interstellar blast waves, and hot gas permeating galaxy clusters. How much shock heating goes to electrons instead of ions, and what plasma physics controls electron heating? We…
Ionospheric conductance is a crucial factor in regulating the closure of magnetospheric field-aligned currents through the ionosphere as Hall and Pedersen currents. Despite its importance in predictive investigations of the magnetosphere -…
Atmospheric gravity waves (GWs) are generated in the lower atmosphere by various weather phenomena. They propagate upward, carry energy and momentum to higher altitudes, and appreciably influence the general circulation upon depositing them…
We analyze the short cosmic ray intensity increase ("cosmic ray burst": CRB) on June 22, 2015 utilizing a global network of muon detectors and derive the global anisotropy of cosmic ray intensity and the density (i.e. the omnidirectional…
We use the am, an, as and the a-sigma geomagnetic indices to the explore a previously overlooked factor in magnetospheric electrodynamics, namely the inductive effect of diurnal motions of the Earth's magnetic poles toward and away from the…
Non-equilibrium ionization (NEI) is a key process often times neglected when modeling astrophysical plasmas with thermodynamical timescales much shorter than the timescales for ionization and recombination. In this paper, we perform NEI…
In the United States, scientific research in space weather is funded by several Government Agencies including the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA). For commercial purposes, space weather…