The Sun’s magnetic field shapes the solar wind into a vast, three-dimensional structure that Earth flies through, but no spacecraft has ever mapped it from above or below the solar equator. This project uses two new streams of data to fill that gap. From February 2025, the Solar Orbiter spacecraft will climb to 18 degrees north and south of the Sun’s equator—the first such measurements inside Earth’s orbit—to map how the heliospheric magnetic field changes with latitude. At the same time, the NASA IMAP mission, launching in mid-2025, will join five other spacecraft in a halo orbit around the L1 point, creating a constellation that can measure the magnetic field’s three-dimensional structure on the scale of solar wind turbulence—roughly 100 Earth radii. Understanding how the solar wind and magnetic field arrive at Earth matters because they drive space weather. Better predictions of their spatial variability would improve forecasts for satellite operations, power grids, and aviation communications. The work is fundamentally curiosity-driven, but mapping the Sun’s magnetic influence in three dimensions is a necessary step before any practical forecasting model can be built.
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This proposal addresses two key questions in space plasma physics: How is the three dimensional heliosphere controlled by the solar magnetic field? What is the structure of the near-Earth interplanetary magnetic field on the scale of the magnetosphere? For the first question, we will use new measurements from the Solar Orbiter spacecraft as it moves out of the solar equatorial plane from February 2025. No such measurements have been made within Earth orbit, but Orbiter will make scans between 18 degrees North and South, taking a month, every 5 months from April 2025. We will use these to map the latitudinal structure of the heliospheric magnetic field as it evolves and compare it to remote measurements and models. We will constrain these models, since there are major unresolved discrepancies in the existing data. We will combine our data with those of other spacecraft such as Parker Solar Probe and BepiColombo to show how the low latitude wind, including that near the Earth, is affected by that at higher latitudes. For the second question, we will again use new data: from the NASA IMAP mission launching in mid-2025, as well as others, which will give us for the first time six spacecraft measuring the solar wind and magnetic field in the upstream L1 halo orbit. By combining measurements from this constellation we will be able to measure the 3D structure of the magnetic field on the driving scale of the solar wind turbulence, around 100 Earth radii: this is vital for understanding how turbulence evolves in the solar wind since plasma turbulence is, unlike in hydrodynamics, greatly affected by how it is driven. We will also develop methods to combine data from all the spacecraft to make better predictions of the solar wind and magnetic field arriving at the Earth and its spatial variability, which is important as an input for understanding the dynamics of the magnetosphere. This work is timely given the spacecraft orbits and launches. We are ideally placed to undertake it, given our experience in both the near-Sun solar wind and multi-spacecraft analysis methods and our key mission roles (Solar Orbiter MAG Principal Investigator and IMAP MAG instrument lead).
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