Abstract
Future in situ space plasma investigations will likely involve spatially distributed observatories comprised of multiple spacecraft, beyond the four and five spacecraft configurations currently in operation. Inferring the magnetic field structure across the observatory, and not simply at the observation points, is a necessary step towards characterizing fundamental plasma processes using these unique multi-point, multi-scale data sets. We propose improvements upon the classic first-order reconstruction method, as well as a second-order method, utilizing magnetometer measurements from a realistic nine-spacecraft observatory. The improved first-order method, which averages over select ensembles of four spacecraft, reconstructs the magnetic field associated with simple current sheets and numerical simulations of turbulence accurately over larger volumes compared to second-order methods or first-order methods using a single regular tetrahedron. Using this averaging method on data sets with fewer than nine measurement points, the volume of accurate reconstruction compared to a known magnetic vector field improves approximately linearly with the number of measurement points.
Highlights
Plasmas, which are ubiquitous throughout the Universe, are readily available for study in the natural laboratory of space
We focus on the fidelity of the reproduction of the magnetic field using a sparsely sampled set of measurements whose spatial configuration is based upon realistic configurations of the proposed nine-spacecraft HelioSwarm observatory, described for instance by Plice et al (2020)
We have demonstrated that our reconstruction methods are an effective way to leverage magnetometer measurements from a configuration consisting of more than four spacecraft
Summary
Plasmas, which are ubiquitous throughout the Universe, are readily available for study in the natural laboratory of space. In order to characterize fundamental processes governing heliospheric plasmas, the space plasma community has utilized in-situ spacecraft measurements of electromagnetic fields and charged particles. Knowledge of B from a single magnetometer is limited; single-point measurements can not construct the full three-dimensional structure characteristic of processes such as magnetic reconnection and plasma turbulence. To avoid this shortcoming, ESA’s CLUSTER (Escoubet et al, 2001), NASA’s THEMIS (Angelopoulos, 2008) and MMS (Burch et al, 2016) missions have employed four- and five-spacecraft configurations, where each spacecraft is equipped with an
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