Tour of the Plasmasphere and Plasmapause

  • Released Wednesday, December 15, 2004
  • Updated Friday, January 16, 2015 at 2:30PM
  • ID: 3050

The plasmasphere is a region of ionospheric plasma which co-rotates with the Earth, carried by the magnetic field lines. This plasma tends to be colder (i.e. the ions have lower average energy) than the outer region of the magnetosphere. The plasmapause marks the outer boundary of this region. This visualization is a simple fly-around tour of the plasmapause (green) in a relatively quiescent state. For this visualization, the 3-dimensional structure was constructed from the equatorial profile of the plasmapause (as measured by IMAGE/EUV data) by extending the region along field lines of a simple dipole field.


Credits

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio


Missions

This visualization is related to the following missions:

Series

This visualization can be found in the following series:

Datasets used in this visualization

IMAGE (Collected with the EUV sensor)

Note: While we identify the data sets used in these visualizations, we do not store any further details nor the data sets themselves on our site.


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