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How accurately can we measure the reconnection rate $E_M$ for the MMS diffusion region event of 2017-07-11? by Genestreti, Kevin J.; Nakamura, Takuma; Nakamura, Rumi; Denton, Richard E.; Torbert, Roy B.; Burch, James L.; Plaschke, Ferdinand; Fuselier, Stephen A.; Ergun, Robert E.; Giles, Barbara L.; Russell, Christopher T. is a scholarly article available to read on EtoBox.

We investigate the accuracy with which the reconnection electric field $E_M$ can be determined from in-situ plasma data. We study the magnetotail electron diffusion region observed by NASA's Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) on 2017-07-11 at 22:34 UT and focus on the very large errors in $E_M$ that result from errors in an $LMN$ boundary-normal coordinate system. We determine several $LMN$ coordinates for this MMS event using several different methods. We use these $M$ axes to estimate $E_M$. We find some consensus that the reconnection rate was roughly $E_M$=3.2 mV/m $\pm$ 0.06 mV/m, which corresponds to a normalized reconnection rate of $0.18\pm0.035$. Minimum variance analysis of the electron velocity (MVA-$v_e$), MVA of $E$, minimization of Faraday residue, and an adjusted version of the maximum directional derivative of the magnetic field (MDD-$B$) technique all produce {reasonably} similar coordinate axes. We use virtual MMS data from a particle-in-cell simulation of this event to estimate the errors in the coordinate axes and reconnection rate associated with MVA-$v_e$ and MDD-$B$. The $L$ and $M$ directions are most reliably determined by MVA-$v_e$ when the spacecraft observe

Author

Genestreti, Kevin J.; Nakamura, Takuma; Nakamura, Rumi; Denton, Richard E.; Torbert, Roy B.; Burch, James L.; Plaschke, Ferdinand; Fuselier, Stephen A.; Ergun, Robert E.; Giles, Barbara L.; Russell, Christopher T.

Published

2018

Language

EN