GRACE Accelerometers Sensitive to Ionosphere Plasma Waves: Similarities between Twangs and Whistlers

Abstract

Electrostatic space accelerometers are high-precision instruments used in gravity and magnetic fields and in fundamental physics missions. From their first use in space, these instruments show disturbances around the read-out frequency. In recent missions like Swarm and GRACE-FO, these instruments are seriously compromised. Their capability cannot be fully exploited or, in the worst case, not used for science data processing at all. We currently neither understand the mechanism nor the cause of the disturbance. For that reason, every correlation, direct or indirect, between signatures in the accelerometer data and other phenomena in the satellite environment is very important to study. In the GRACE mission, some of the disturbances relate to onboard current switching processes, such as switching of heater and torquer currents. In this paper, we examine the phenomena called twangs. The shape of these disturbances is responsible for their name, because they look like a decaying tone. Some of these twangs seem to relate to changing currents, too. They occur when sunlight hits surfaces of the satellite. This can cause the discharging of satellite parts. Here, we focus on special twangs, which we call cloud-related twangs, as recent investigations related them to cloud coverage. How can clouds in the troposphere influence a satellite, orbiting in the ionosphere? We investigated the troposphere–ionosphere coupling and found that the only coupling which can be responsible for disturbances on satellites and which may affect the accelerometers, are electromagnetic waves traveling in the so-called whistler mode at frequencies in the very-low-frequency (VLF) domain. This special propagation mode is a coupled electromagnetic and electrostatic mode. There, the electric field vector has a component in the direction of propagation due to the interaction with ions and the magnetic field in the ionosphere and magnetosphere. This led us to investigate the similarities between whistlers and twangs. The hypothesis that they are related is very important in our further understanding of disturbances on satellite instruments sensible to electromagnetic pulses in the range of very low frequencies and below.