The brief report presents a part of the research results of the magnetospheric physics researches in China during the period of 2006—2008.During the past two years,China-ESA co-operation DSP(Double Star Program) satellites were basically operating normally in its extended lifetime.The DSP and Cluster missions provide Chinese space physicists high quality data to study multi-scale physical process in the magnetosphere.The work made based on the data of DSP is presented in the paper of "Progress of Double Star Program" of this issue.
The Double Star Programme (DSP) is the first joint space mission between China and ESA. The mission, which is made of two spacecraft, is designed to investigate the magnetospheric global processes and their response to the interplanetary disturbances in conjunction with the Cluster mission. The first spacecraft, TC-1 (Tan Ce means "Explorer"), was launched on 30 December 2003, and the second one, TC-2, on 25 July 2004 on board two Chinese Long March 2C. Due to the importance of and success of DSP, both CNSA and ESA approved the extension of DSP. This paper presents DSP mission and some important scientific results made based on the data of DSP.
A statistical study of the properties of ions (O+, He+ and H+) measured by the Cluster-II in cusp region as a function of the solar wind dynamic pressure and geomagnetic index Kp respectively was made dur-ing the summer and fall of 2001-2003. The main results are that: (1) O+ ion density responds in a sig-nificant way to geomagnetic index Kp, and He+ ion density is not correlated with geomagnetic index Kp, both of them have a significant positive correlation with solar wind dynamic pressure; (2) H+ ion density is also observed to increase with solar wind dynamic pressure, and not correlated with geomagnetic index Kp.
An asynchronous and parallel time-marching method for three-dimensional (3D) time-dependent magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulation is used for large-scale solar wind simulation. It uses different local time steps in the corona and the heliosphere according to the local Courant-Friedrichs-Levy (CFL) conditions. The solar wind background with observed solar photospheric magnetic field as input is first presented. The simulation time for the background solar wind by using the asynchronous method is <1/6 of that by using the normal synchronous time-marching method with the same computation precision. Then, we choose the coronal mass ejection (CME) event of 13 November, 2003 as a test case. The time-dependent variations of the pressure and the velocity configured from a CME model at the inner boundary are applied to generate transient structures in order to study the dynamical interaction of a CME with the background solar wind flow between 1 and 230 Rs. This time-marching method is very effective in terms of computation time for large-scale 3D time-dependent numerical MHD problem. In this validation study, we find that this 3D MHD model, with the asynchronous and parallel time-marching method, provides a relatively satisfactory comparison with the ACE spacecraft obser- vations at L1 point.
Their brief report presents the advances of the magnetospheric physics researches in China during the period of 2004-2006. During the past two years, China-ESA cooperation DSP (Double Star Program) satellites were successively launched. In addition, China also participated in the scientific research of ESA's Cluster mission. The DSP and Cluster missions provide Chinese space physicists high quality data to study multiscale physical process in the magnetosphere. The work made based on the data of DSP is presented in the paper of "Progress of Double Star Program" of this issue.
We analyze Double Star TC-1 magnetic field data from July to September in 2004 and find that plas-moids exist in the very near-Earth magnetotail. It is the first time that TC-1 observes the plasmoids inthe magnetotail at X > ?13 RE. According to the difference of the magnetic field structure in plasmoids,we choose two typical cases for our study: the magnetic flux rope on August 6 with the open magneticfield and the magnetic loop on September 14 with the closed magnetic field. Both of the cases are as-sociated with the high speed earthward flow and the magnetic loop is related to a strong substorm. Theions can escape from the magnetic flux rope along its open field line, but the case of the closed mag-netic loop can trap the ions. The earthward flowing plasmoids observed by TC-1 indicate that the mul-tiple X-line magnetic reconnection occurs beyond the distance of X=?10 RE from the earth.
ZHANG YongCunLIU ZhenXingSHEN ChaoDUAN SuPingHE ZhaoHaiC M CARRH REME
