ARGOS/EUVIP Data Development and Utilization

Our long term goal is to understand the density structure of the Earths plasmasphere and the physical processes that contribute to the formation of the plasmapause. Of particular interest is the coupling between the plasmasphere and the ionosphere, the use of global helium images to obtain the density structure, and the physical constraints that restrict any theoretical model. We wish to refine our current model of the plasmasphere, the Multi-Species Kinetic Model of the Plasmasphere MSKPM, using numerical models for both the topside ionosphere and the large-scale convection electric field. We also wish to validate MSKPM using the data from the Extreme Ultraviolet Imaging Photometer EUVIP instrument on the Advanced Research and Global Observation Satellite ARGOS, as well as from the Extreme Ultraviolet EUV instrument on the Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration IMAGE satellite. Both EUVIP and EUV will measure the 30.4 nm sunlight scattered by helium ions in the topside ionosphere and the plasmasphere. Inversion of this data Meier et al., 1998 is necessary to recover the density structure and any parameters that govern the density structure.