COUSIN: A Study of Small-Scale Auroral Region Energy Deposition

Numerous studies have suggested that accounting for small scale variability of plasma, precipitation, and neutral gas is critical to accurately describing the global response of the ionosphere-thermosphere (IT) system to energy inputs from the magnetosphere. Global numerical simulation studies have provided rough quantitative assessments of the degree to which thermospheric responses can be affected by plasma and neutral variability at these small scales, showing on the order of ~100K exospheric temperature variations and ~40% differences in modeled density when small-scale variability is included. However, it is not sufficient to simply aggregate existing measurements to determine the importance of this small scale variability to the IT system. What is needed are comprehensive, simultaneous, and high cadence measurement of electrodynamic parameters (fields and conductivity) and thermospheric responses (winds, density) at the targeted small scales for a specific event. To make new progress on this important topic, the COUSIN investigation addresses two focused science questions using high cadence measurements for plasma density, electron precipitation, and neutral winds: (1) How do background convection, neutral winds, and ionospheric conductivity contribute to small-scale structure of the auroral current system? (2) How does the thermosphere respond locally, in terms of winds, to auroral forcing at small scales, including Joule heating and electron precipitation? COUSIN achieves the breadth of measurements necessary to address its science by contributing five key instruments to the European-led SYSTER sounding rocket investigation: APES to measure auroral precipitation, PLASMIC to measure high energy auroral precipitation, RAPS to measure plasma density, and both the Ionization Gauge and Cross Track Wind Sensor (CWTS) to measure neutral gas properties. Launching from Esrange in Sweden, SYSTER will combine US (COUSIN) and European rocket-based instruments with extensive ground-based context observations to make new scientific progress. The results from this investigation will provide much-needed constraints on small-scale variability in the IT system and its importance to IT dynamics, providing an important foundation from which future studies of IT responses and magnetospheric impacts can be built.

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