the Plasma Observatory Mission
Plasma Observatory (PO) is a mission proposed in response to the ESA M7 call and selected for the Phase A study. PO is tailored to study plasma energization and energy transport in the Earth’s Magnetospheric System through simultaneous measurements at both fluid and ion scales.
Mission. PO will allow us to resolve for the first time scale coupling in the Earth’s Magnetospheric System, leading to transformative advances in the field of space plasma physics with implications on research fields that span from space weather to the understanding of the farthest astrophysical plasmas. To this goal, the PO mission includes one mothercraft and six identical smallsat daughtercraft flying in a two tetrahedra formation with a common vertex on a orbit that covers all the key regions of the Magnetospheric System including the foreshock, the bow shock, the magnetosheath, the magnetopause, the magnetotail current sheet, and the transition region. PO baseline orbit is an HEO 8×17 RE orbit with an inclination of 15° and spacecraft separation ranging from fluid (5000 km) to ion (30 km) scales.
Lead Proposer
Maria Federica Marcucci
maria.marcucci@inaf.it
Co-Lead Proposer
Alessandro Retinò
alessandro.retino@lpp.polytechnique.fr
Two PO orbits at six months apart
The MSC payload provides a complete characterization of electromagnetic fields and particles in a single point with time resolution sufficient to resolve kinetic physics at sub-ion scales and fully characterize wave-particle interactions. The DSCs have identical payload, simpler than the MSC payload, yet giving a full characterization of the plasma at the ion and fluid scales and providing the context where energization and transport occurs.