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Rocket Experiment for Neutral Upwelling 3 (RENU3)
Project Summary
This proposal, entitled “Rocket Experiment for Neutral Upwelling 3 (RENU3)”, is submitted to the NASA Research Announcement NNH20ZD-A001N-HLCAS, Heliophysics Low Cost Access to Space program and is a multiple investigator sounding rocket project for investigating neutral winds in the cusp during a thermospheric upwelling event. We propose a launch (tentatively) in the winter of 2024/25 from the Andoya Rocket Range. RENU3 will transit the cusp region during a neutral upwelling event, equipped with a suite of onboard instruments and supported with comprehensive ground-based instruments that will build on previous observations of this phenomena from RENU2, launched in December, 2015.
The design of the RENU3 mission and payload is based on the highly successful RENU2 mission. The RENU2 experiment was designed to provide new physical insight into the physical processes associated with the upwelling of thermospheric gas in the Earth's magnetic cusp. This phenomenon was first reported by Luhr et al., 2004 and was thought by those authors to be due to small-scale Joule heating in the cusp. Since that report was published, however, other ideas have emerged which offer plausible explanations for this phenomenon, including large-scale convection, soft electron precipitation and Alfven waves. The main objective of RENU2 was to acquire data that could be used to distinguish the relative contributions of each process.
Analysis of the RENU2 data has resulted in several publications and showed that the high-altitude thermosphere contains a significant amount of structure during an upwelling event. The evolution of this structuring implies that significant high-altitude winds must play a role and that these winds likely are also structured. The RENU3 payload will support in-situ measurements of these high-altitude winds, as well as observations of various parameters that constitute the energy inputs to the system. These inputs will be used to drive the Aerospace Dynamical Model (ADM), which predicts neutral wind dynamics with high resolution.
A secondary objective, in support of instrument development, will be to measure upflowing fluxes of O+ and N2+ in-situ (RENU2 observed O and N2+ at high altitudes, optically). While these populations are known to contribute to ion upflow, very little is known about their relative fluxes and the conditions that regulate these dynamics. This is important because of the global effects of ion outflow, such as mass-loading of the magnetosphere; ion upflow is also thought to play a key role in planetary atmospheric escape, in general.
To summarize, the RENU3 science questions are: 1a. What are the properties of high-altitude thermospheric winds (versus altitude) associated with a cusp-related neutral upwelling event? 1b. What are the ionosphere-thermosphere system input parameters that drive the upwelling event? 1c. Which aspects of the observations match modeling results and which do not? 2. What are the relative fluxes of upflowing N+2 and O+ during the event?
The significance of the proposed work is highlighted in NASA’s Heliophysics Science Strategic Objective “to understand the Sun and its interactions with Earth and the solar system, including space weather”, from NASA’s Science Plan for 2014. Science Goals 1 and 2 of this strategic objective refer to physical processes in the space environment, including how the Sun interacts with the Earth. The basic objective of RENU3 is to understand processes linking aurora and its effects on the thermosphere in the cusp region.
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