HR: 1340h
AN: SA43A-1072    [Abstracts]
TI: IMAGE in the Solar Wind During the October 31, 2003 Event
AU: * Collier, M R
EM: michael.r.collier@nasa.gov
AF: NASA, Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD 20770 United States
AU: Moore, T E
EM: thomas.e.moore@gsfc.nasa.gov
AF: NASA, Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD 20770 United States
AU: Fok, M
EM: mei-ching.h.fok@nasa.gov
AF: NASA, Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD 20770 United States
AU: Pilkerton, B
EM: bpilkerton@lepvax.gsfc.nasa.gov
AF: NASA, Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD 20770 United States
AU: Benson, R
EM: robert.f.benson@nasa.gov
AF: NASA, Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD 20770 United States
AU: Green, J
EM: green@mail630.gsfc.nasa.gov
AF: NASA, Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD 20770 United States
AU: Boardsen, S
EM: boardsen@mail630.gsfc.nasa.gov
AF: NASA, Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD 20770 United States
AB: During the large October 31, 2003 solar storm event, the Low Energy Neutral Atom (LENA) Imager on the IMAGE spacecraft observed unusual behavior in the neutral solar wind. For a nearly two-hour interval centered near 0630 UT, the diffuse neutral solar wind signal which results from solar wind charge exchange in the magnetosheath disappeared leaving only a weak signal from the direction of the Earth and a stronger signal from the Sun direction. The Radio Plasma Imager (RPI) data indicate that the IMAGE spacecraft was in interplanetary space at the time of the unusual neutral solar wind observations and based on an analysis of RPI-stimulated plasma resonance and the cut-off frequency of a type III solar burst reveal a solar wind electron number density of 20-40 cm${}^{-3}$. These densities are substantially larger than the solar wind proton densities measured by ACE at this time, by a factor of 5-10. The LENA neutral solar wind observations can be qualitatively reproduced by assuming the proton densities are comparable to the higher RPI-derived electron densities, but not by using the observed ACE solar wind proton densities. Furthermore, preliminary ring current simulations using the observed ACE solar wind proton densities disagree with Dst* by about an order of magnitude based on the simulated ring current energy. We will also discuss the effect of this density discrepancy on ring current simulations.
DE: 2151 Neutral particles
DE: 2164 Solar wind plasma
DE: 2778 Ring current
DE: 2788 Storms and substorms
SC: SPA-Aeronomy [SA]
MN: 2004 AGU Fall Meeting