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Electron Microburst Size Distribution Derived with AeroCube-6
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  • Mykhaylo Shumko,
  • Arlo Johnson,
  • John Sample,
  • Brady A Griffith,
  • Drew L. Turner,
  • Thomas Paul O'Brien,
  • Oleksiy Agapitov,
  • J Bernard Blake,
  • Seth G. Claudepierre
Mykhaylo Shumko
Montana State University

Corresponding Author:[email protected]

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Arlo Johnson
Montana State University
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John Sample
Montana State University
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Brady A Griffith
Montana State University
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Drew L. Turner
The Aerospace Corporation
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Thomas Paul O'Brien
The Aerospace Corporation
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Oleksiy Agapitov
Space Science Laboratory, UC Berkeley
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J Bernard Blake
The Aerospace Corporation
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Seth G. Claudepierre
The Aerospace Corporation
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Abstract

Microbursts are an impulsive increase of electrons from the radiation belts into the atmosphere and have been directly observed in low Earth orbit and the upper atmosphere. Prior work has estimated that microbursts are capable of rapidly depleting the radiation belt electrons on the order of a day, hence their role to radiation belt electron losses must be considered. Losses due to microbursts are not well constrained, and more work is necessary to accurately quantify their contribution as a loss process. To address this question we present a statistical study of > 35 keV microburst sizes using the pair of AeroCube-6 CubeSats. The microburst size distribution in low Earth orbit and the magnetic equator was derived using both spacecraft. In low Earth orbit, the majority of microbursts were observed while the AeroCube-6 separation was less than a few tens of km, mostly in latitude. To account for the statistical effects of random microburst locations and sizes, Monte Carlo and analytic models were developed to test hypothesized microburst size distributions. A family of microburst size distributions were tested and a Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampler was used to estimate the optimal distribution of model parameters. Finally, a majority of observed microbursts map to sizes less then 200 km at the magnetic equator. Since microbursts are widely believed to be generated by scattering of radiation belt electrons by whistler mode waves, the observed microburst size distribution was compared to whistler mode chorus size distributions derived in prior literature.
Mar 2020Published in Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics volume 125 issue 3. 10.1029/2019JA027651