Images & Animations
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Credit
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio
Earth's Radiation Belts Tremble Under Impact of Solar Storm
Tour of the Plasmasphere and Plasmapause
Under the wave of energetic particles from the Halloween 2003 solar storm events, the Earth's radiation belts underwent significant changes in structure. This visualization is constructed using daily-averaged particle flux data from the SAMPEX satellite installed in a simple dipole model for the Earth's magnetic field. The toroidal structure of the belts corresponds to regions with electron fluxes in excess of 100 electrons/s/cm^2/steradian with energies of 2-6 MeV. The color-scale on the cross section is violet for low flux and white for high flux. The translucent grey arcs represent the fields lines of the Earth's dipole field. The 3-dimensional structure was built from the SAMPEX measurement by propagating the particle flux values along field lines of a simple magnetic dipole.
The plasmasphere is a region of ionospheric plasma which co-rotates with the Earth, carried by the magnetic field lines. This plasma tends to be colder (i.e. the ions have lower average energy) than the outer region of the magnetosphere. The plasmapause marks the outer boundary of this region. This visualization is a simple fly-around tour of the plasmapause (green) in a relatively quiescent state. For this visualization, the 3-dimensional structure was constructed from the equatorial profile of the plasmapause (as measured by IMAGE/EUV data) by extending the region along field lines of a simple dipole field.
An equatorial view of the plasmasphere.
Metadata
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Sensor
IMAGE/EUV -
Animation ID
3050 -
Video ID
None -
Start Timecode
00:00:00:00 -
End Timecode
00:00:00:00 -
Animator
Tom Bridgman, James W. Williams, Greg Shirah -
Studio
SVS -
Visualization Date
2004/12/01 -
Scientist
Jerald Goldstein (SwRI) -
Keywords
Plasmasphere, Plasmapause -
DLESE Subject
Space science -
Data Date
2003/10/29 -
Pao ID
G04-071 -
Animation Type
Regular
