Determining wind field and electric field by a barium release experiment in the ionosphere

Abstract

Barium release experiment is an effective way to study the near-earth environment, in which artificial plasma cloud is created via ionization of neutral gases released from a rocket or a satellite. The first barium release experiment in China was successfully carried out by a sounding rocket at a height of about 190 km on April 5, 2013. The observed barium cloud images show that the neutral cloud follows a damping motion, whose velocity decreases exponentially and finally tends towards the wind velocity of the background. But for the ion cloud, the motion is controlled mainly by the Lorentz force and a E×B drift happens. This work is devoted to calculating the wind and electric field of the background by analyzing the observed images from different stations. It turns out that the wind has a magnitude of 51.28 m/s, which is mainly in the northeast direction but also has an appreciable vertical component; the ion cloud has a drift velocity of 71.38 m/s, with a large vertical velocity component besides the horizontal components, then the electric field is obtained from the drift velocity as 2.49 mV/m. It is interesting that the wind field shows a better agreement with GITM model than the other empirical or theoretical models, and the GITM model can also give a good prediction for the ion velocity observed by us, which is consistent with the ISR observation at Jicamarca as well.