The Demonstration and Science Experiments Mission: Modeling of Wave
Propagation and Triggered Emissions
Abstract
The Demonstration and Science Experiments (DSX) mission operated in
medium Earth orbit from 25 June 2019 until 31 May 2021. During this time
it conducted experiments that actively injected very low frequency waves
into the inner magnetosphere to study wave generation, wave propagation,
and wave-particle interactions. Experiment planning used cold plasma ray
tracing to predict conjunctions for space-to-space transmissions, and
the same technique supports post-mission analysis of both monostatic and
bistatic signal receptions. Modifications for warm plasma may also be
required for extremely oblique waves. In addition, evaluations of
amplitude thresholds for triggered emissions provide bounds on DSX
signal amplitudes useful for constraining the antenna performance. This
report describes both of these analytical tools in the context of
mission planning and data analysis. Ongoing analysis using these
techniques will be reported in future publications.