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Statistical Properties of Electron Curtain Precipitation Estimated with AeroCube-6
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  • Mykhaylo Shumko,
  • Arlo Johnson,
  • Thomas Paul O'Brien,
  • Drew L. Turner,
  • Ashley D Greeley,
  • John Sample,
  • J Bernard Blake,
  • Lauren W Blum,
  • Alexa J. Halford
Mykhaylo Shumko
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

Corresponding Author:[email protected]

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Arlo Johnson
Montana State University
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Thomas Paul O'Brien
The Aerospace Corporation
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Drew L. Turner
The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
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Ashley D Greeley
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
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John Sample
Montana State University
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J Bernard Blake
The Aerospace Corporation
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Lauren W Blum
NASA/Goddard
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Alexa J. Halford
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
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Abstract

Curtain precipitation are a recently discovered stationary, persistent, and latitudinally narrow electron precipitation phenomenon in low Earth orbit. Curtains are observed over consecutive passes of the dual AeroCube-6 CubeSats while their in-track lag varied from a fraction of a second to 65 seconds, with dosimeters that are sensitive to > 30 keV electrons. This study uses the AeroCube-6 mission to quantify the statistical properties of 1,634 curtains observed over three years. We found that many curtains are narrower than 10 kilometers in the latitudinal direction with 90\% narrower than 20 kilometers, corresponding to a few hundred kilometer radial size at the magnetic equator. We examined the magnetic local time and geomagnetic dependence of curtains. We found that curtains are observed in the late-morning and pre-midnight magnetic local times, with a higher occurrence rate at pre-midnight, and curtains are observed more often during times of enhanced Auroral Electrojet. We found a few curtains in the bounce loss cone region above the north Atlantic, whose electrons were continuously scattered for at least 6 seconds. Such observations suggest that continuous curtain precipitation may be a significant loss of > 30 keV electrons from the magnetosphere into the atmosphere, possibly scattered by a parallel direct current electric field.
Dec 2020Published in Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics volume 125 issue 12. 10.1029/2020JA028462