Title
Tomographic Estimation of Exospheric Hydrogen Density Distributions
Date Issued
01 June 2018
Access level
open access
Resource Type
journal article
Author(s)
Waldrop L.
University of Illinois
Publisher(s)
Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Abstract
For the past decade, the Lyman-alpha detectors on board National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Two Wide-angle Imaging Neutral-atom Spectrometers (TWINS) mission have obtained routine measurements of solar Lyman-α photons (121.6 nm) resonantly scattered by atomic hydrogen (H) in the terrestrial exosphere. These data have been used to derive global three-dimensional (3-D) models of exospheric H density beyond 3 RE, which are needed to understand various aspects of aeronomy and heliophysics, such as atmospheric chemistry and energetics, magnetospheric energy dissipation, ion-neutral coupling, and atmospheric evolution through gravitational escape. These empirical distributions are obtained through parametric fitting of assumed functional forms that have little observational justification, thus limiting confidence in conclusions drawn from analysis of the resulting exospheric structure. In this work, we present a new means of global 3-D reconstruction of exospheric H density through tomographic inversion of the scattered H Lyman-α emission. Our approach avoids the conventional dependence on ad hoc parametric formulations and, based on the case studies reported here, appears to enable a more accurate characterization of the global structure of the H density in the outer exosphere. We evaluate the bounds of technique feasibility using simulated TWINS data and report new geophysical insights gained from applying this promising new approach to an example of actual TWINS data.
Start page
5119
End page
5139
Volume
123
Issue
6
Language
English
OCDE Knowledge area
Geoquímica, Geofísica
Subjects
Scopus EID
2-s2.0-85050301451
Source
Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics
ISSN of the container
21699380
Sources of information:
Directorio de Producción Científica
Scopus