Expected Scientific Results of the IMAGE Mission

J.L. Burch 
Southwest Research Institute 
San Antonio, TX 78228  
United States
email: jburch@swri.edu

     The Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration (IMAGE) Midex 
spacecraft will be launched in February 2000.  The objective of the mission 
is to obtain answers to the following questions:  (1) What are the dominant 
mechanisms for injecting plasma into the magnetosphere on substorm and 
magnetic storm time scales?  (2) What is the directly driven response of 
the magnetosphere to solar wind changes?  and  (3) How and where are 
magnetospheric plasmas energized, transported, and subsequently lost during 
storms and substorms?  IMAGE will address these questions by obtaining 
ultraviolet, neutral atom, and radio plasma images of the magnetosphere on 
time scales of a few minutes.  Mission and instrument descriptions, along 
with simulated data will be presented.