A significant increase in the number of anthropogenic objects in Earth orbit has necessitated the development of satellite conjunction assessment and collision avoidance capabilities for new spacecraft. Often, the greatest source of uncertainty in predicting a satellite's trajectory in low Earth orbit originates from atmospheric neutral mass density variability caused by enhanced geomagnetic activity and solar EUV absorption. This work investigates the impacts of solar and geomagnetic index forecasting uncertainty on satellite drag and satellite maneuver decision-making. During an averaged point in the solar cycle, accurate index forecasts with reduced uncertainty are shown to provide significantly improved advance notice for dangerous conjunction events above 500 km. Below 500 km, forecast improvements are less impactful. This boundary of utility from forecast improvements shifts upward and downward during solar maximum and solar minimum, respectively. Improved index forecasts are shown to have little impact on making maneuver decisions 12-24 hours from a potential conjunction event, but are demonstrated to be very useful when trying to make maneuver decisions with more lead time. These improved forecasts of the space weather indices help in making actionable, durable conjunction predictions sooner than is currently possible.

The boundaries of the auroral oval and auroral electrojets are an important source of information for understanding the coupling between the solar wind and the near-earth plasma environment. Of these two types of boundaries the auroral electrojet boundaries have received comparatively little attention, and even less attention has been given to the connection between the two. Here we introduce a technique for estimating the electrojet boundaries, and other properties such as total current and peak current, from 1-D latitudinal profiles of the eastward component of equivalent current sheet density. We apply this technique to a preexisting database of such currents along the 105◦ magnetic meridian producing a total of eleven years of 1 minute resolution electrojet boundaries during the period 2000–2020. Using statistics and conjunction events we compare our electrojet boundary dataset with an existing electrojet boundary dataset, based on Swarm satellite measurements, and auroral oval proxies based on particle precipitation and field aligned currents. This allows us to validate our dataset and investigate the feasibility of an auroral oval proxy based on electrojet boundaries. Through this investigation we find the proton precipitation auroral oval is a closer match with the electrojet boundaries. However, the bimodal nature of the electrojet boundaries as we approach the noon and midnight discontinuities makes an average electrojet oval poorly defined. With this and the direct comparisons differing from the statistics, defining the proton auroral oval from electrojet boundaries across all local and universal times is challenging.

Models of the high-latitude ionospheric electric field are commonly used to specify the magnetospheric forcing in thermosphere or whole atmosphere models. The use of decades-old models based on spacecraft data is still widespread. Currently the Heelis and Weimer climatology models are most commonly used but it is possible a more recent electric field model could improve forecasting functionality. Modern electric field models, derived from radar data, have been developed to incorporate advances in data availability. It is expected that climatologies based on this larger and up-to-date dataset will better represent the high latitude ionosphere and improve forecasting abilities. An example of two such models, which have been developed using line-of-sight velocity measurements from the Super Dual Auroral Radar Network (SuperDARN) are the Thomas and Shepherd model (TS18), and the Time-Variable Ionospheric Electric Field model (TiVIE). Here we compare the outputs of these electric field models during the September 2017 storm, covering a range of solar wind and interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) conditions. We explore the relationships between the IMF conditions and the model output parameters such as transpolar voltage, the polar cap size and the lower latitude boundary of convection. We find that the electric potential and field parameters from the spacecraft-based models have a significantly higher magnitude than the SuperDARN-based models. We discuss the similarities and differences in topology and magnitude for each model.