2016
Ref: CTALK-2017-0050

The discovery of an electron current at Earth's McIlwain L=6

Katsiyannis, Thanassis ; Dominique, Marie ; Pierrard, Viviane ; Borremans, Kris ; De Keyser, Johan ; Berghmans, David ; Kruglanski, Michel ; Dammasch, Ingolf ; De Donder, Erwin


Talk presented at SDO 2016: Unraveling the Sun's complexity on 2016-10-19

Abstract: The Large Yield RAdiometer (LYRA) is an ultraviolet solar radiometer on-board ESA's PROBA2 micro-satellite. Since its launch in 2009 to an altitude of 735km, one of the most peculiar and intriguing results of LYRA is the detection of short, strong, bursts that do not directly correlate with solar coronal events, nor with pointing of the instrument to Earth's upper atmosphere, but correlate well with high a$_{p}$ index on Earth's surface and the crossing by the satellite of the L=6 shell. Very similar detections were more recently made by the Energetic Particles Telescope (EPT) on board the PROBA-V micro-satellite, establishing the identification of the detections as relativistic electrons of the 2.4-8 MeV energy range. Several attributes of those detections, including their dependency to various space weather indexes (ap, $D_st$, etc), their geographical distribution, a dawn/dusk asymmetry and others will be presented. Open questions related to the discovery of this phenomenon will also be discussed.

Keyword(s): PROBA2 ; LYRA ; Ionosphere ; In situ detections ; ultra-relativistic electrons
Funding: OFOMCTDEP4UCCLE/OFOMCTDEP4UCCLE/OFOMCTDEP4UCCLE


The record appears in these collections:
Conference Contributions & Seminars > Conference Talks > Contributed Talks
Royal Observatory of Belgium > Solar Physics & Space Weather (SIDC)
Royal Belgian Institute for Space Aeronomy
Solar-Terrestrial Centre of Excellence



 Record created 2017-01-17, last modified 2017-01-17