Imaging a geomagnetic storm with energetic neutral atoms

J.D. Perez (1), M.-C. Fok (2), T.E. Moore (2)

(1) Physics Department, Auburn University, Auburn, AL
(2) NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD 

The ring current during a geomagnetic storm on May 2, 1986 has been 
modeled using a bounce averaged kinetic equation for the phase space 
density of hydrogen ions, considering charge exchange and Coulomb 
losses along the drift path.  The resulting equatorial pitch angle 
distribution is used to generate data simulating the medium and high 
energy neutral atom imagers to be flown on IMAGE.  A method for 
deconvolving these images is described and applied to the simulated 
data.  The results show that, when there are sufficient counts, the 
deconvolved distribution contains the main features of the original 
source and that the energy spectrum at a specific time as well as 
the total energy of the ring current as a function of time can be 
extracted from the energetic neutral atom images.

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Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics, 62, 
pp. 911-917, 2000