A method is presented for retrieving the magnetospheric ion distribution from En-ergetic Neutral Atom (ENA) measurements made by the NUADU instrument on the TC-2 spacecraft. Based on the already well-established metho...A method is presented for retrieving the magnetospheric ion distribution from En-ergetic Neutral Atom (ENA) measurements made by the NUADU instrument on the TC-2 spacecraft. Based on the already well-established method of constrained lin-ear inversion, an iterance technique suitable for the low count ENA measurements has been developed which is tolerant of the noise background. By the iterance technique, it is possible for the first time to simultaneously retrieve the magneto-spheric ion distribution and the exospheric neutral density, and further to recover global ENA emissions in three dimensions. The technique is applied to a repre-sentative ENA image recorded in energy channel 2 (protons: 50―81 keV) of the NUADU instrument during a major geomagnetic storm and it is, thereby, shown that the retrieval method developed provides a useful tool for extracting ion distribution information from ENA data.展开更多
基金the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 40674083)Chinese National Key Laboratory research outlay (Grant No. 40523006)SMcKL acknowledges with appreciation the support of Enterprise Ireland
文摘A method is presented for retrieving the magnetospheric ion distribution from En-ergetic Neutral Atom (ENA) measurements made by the NUADU instrument on the TC-2 spacecraft. Based on the already well-established method of constrained lin-ear inversion, an iterance technique suitable for the low count ENA measurements has been developed which is tolerant of the noise background. By the iterance technique, it is possible for the first time to simultaneously retrieve the magneto-spheric ion distribution and the exospheric neutral density, and further to recover global ENA emissions in three dimensions. The technique is applied to a repre-sentative ENA image recorded in energy channel 2 (protons: 50―81 keV) of the NUADU instrument during a major geomagnetic storm and it is, thereby, shown that the retrieval method developed provides a useful tool for extracting ion distribution information from ENA data.
