Abstract
A Nike Black Brant V rocket was launched from the Churchill Research Range (Manitoba) on December 3, 1979, into a bright east‐west oriented auroral arc. The rocket payload consisted of two separable sections, each containing its own telemetry and a full set of wave and charged particle detectors. An electron gun, carried in the main payload, produced a pulsed electron beam with energies of 1.9, 4, and 8 keV at 1, 10, and approximately 100 mA in a programed format. Charged particle observations from the flight are used to define the spatial distribution of perturbed volume surrounding the accelerator during gun firing. The radial dimensions of the perturbation were found to scale with the primary electron beam gyroradius and current and were also dependent on the beam injection angle. On magnetic field lines near the gun, the induced return electron energy spectrum is characterized by a monotonically decreasing intensity with increasing energy out to the approximate beam energy. At increasing distances across field lines the energy spectrum takes on a monoenergetic appearance peaked near the beam energy. All beam‐induced electron fluxes drop rapidly to background at the edge of the perturbed volume. The intense flux of low‐energy electrons observed on field lines near the rocket are shown to be accelerated ambients, whereas the particles at or near the beam energy and at large radial distances are presumably beam primaries. The ambient thermal ion plasma was not measurably affected by the beam while the local electron temperature increased during gun pulses. Results from this flight are compared with the corresponding observations made in a large vacuum tank simulation, and it is concluded that certain features in the data are consistent with the beam‐plasma instability observed in the laboratory.
Published Version
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