The two sides of the earth's dayside magnetopause current sheet (CS) is often characterized by a strong asymmetry in magnetic field strength, plasma temperature and plasma density. These gradients are…

This federal contract award is for a research grant to The Regents of the University of Colorado (CU) to explore the fundamental topic of ion exhaust structure and its relation to electrostatic solitary waves (ESWs) within asymmetric magnetopause reconnection exhausts during southward interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) conditions. The $523,310.37 grant, awarded by a civilian federal agency, aims to employ high-cadence observations from the Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission to investigate the potential connection between ESWs and the structure of asymmetric reconnection exhausts at the dayside magnetopause. The research is not associated with any set-aside designation. CU, a prominent public research university in Boulder, Colorado, has a robust portfolio of federal contract and grant awards across scientific and technological domains, demonstrating extensive capabilities in delivering complex research and mission support services to agencies like NASA, the Department of Defense, and NOAA.

The two sides of the earth's dayside magnetopause current sheet (CS) is often characterized by a strong asymmetry in magnetic field strength, plasma temperature and plasma density. These gradients are known to result in an earthward displacement of the flow stagnation point relative to the magnetic reconnection x-line. The maximum ION flow region of northward and southward reconnection exhausts is thus predicted by cassak and shay (2007) to shift earthward from the BL=0 center of the magnetopause CS, where BL is the component of the magnetic field along the direction of maximum variance. A survey of the MMS EDP parallel electric field across 20 dayside magnetopause ION exhausts for southward IMF conditions indicates a surprisingly ubiquitous presence of electrostatic solitary wave (ESW) signatures deep within asymmetric exhaust regions. Previous kinetic simulations of magnetic reconnection predict that bipolar ESW signatures of parallel electric fields, such as electron phase space holes, generally form in a density cavity region of a reconnection separatrix layer adjacent to the exhaust, which raise the following science questions: how did the observed esws access the exhaust interior? Could they have formed near the separatrix of asymmetric exhausts and somehow propagated into the exhaust? Or did they rather form in association with local exhaust structure in the interior of the asymmetric exhaust? Our science objective is to explore the fundamental topic of ION exhaust structure as a possible conduit for ESW appearance deep within asymmetric magnetopause exhausts during southward IMF. The proposed methodology will employ high-cadence MMS burst observations of fields (e and b), ION and electron moments, and particle distributions across dayside magnetopause ION exhausts to investigate a relation between esws and local exhaust and separatrix structure. MMS observations of the adjacent magnetosheath and magnetosphere will be used to understand if local conditions and gradients across the magnetopause impact the observed exhaust structure and associated ESW characteristics.