Auroral electron time dispersion

A sounding rocket flight was launched from Greenland in 1985 to study high latitude, early morning auroral physics. The payload was instrumented with electron and ion detectors, AC and DC electric field experiments, a plasma density experiment, and a magnetometer to measure the ambient field. The rocket was launched during disturbed conditions, when the polar cap was in a contracted state with visible aurora overhead. The electron data contained numerous signatures indicative of time-of-flight energy dispersion characterized by a coherent structure in which lower energy electrons arrived at the rocket after higher energy electrons. A model was constructed to explain this phenomena by the sudden application of a region of parallel electric field along a length of magnetic field line above the rocket. The model incorporates detector response and uses an altitudinal density profile based on auroral zone measurements. Three types of potential structures were tried: linear, quadratic and cubic. Of the three it was found that the cubic (electric field growing in a quadratic manner moving up the field line) produced the best fit to the data. The potential region was found to be approximately 1-2 $R\sb{e}$ in extent with the lower edge 3000-4000 km away from the rocket. The background electron temperature in the model which produced the best fit to the data was of the order of 15 eV.