Abstract

The GOLD Mission of Opportunity will provide answers to key elements of an overarching question for Heliophysics science: what is the global-scale response of the thermosphere and ionosphere to forcing in the integrated Sun-Earth system? GOLD will perform remote-sensing measurements of the Earth'... Show moreThe GOLD Mission of Opportunity will provide answers to key elements of an overarching question for Heliophysics science: what is the global-scale response of the thermosphere and ionosphere to forcing in the integrated Sun-Earth system? GOLD will perform remote-sensing measurements of the Earth's thermosphere and ionosphere, using an ultraviolet imager on board a commercial, geosynchronous satellite. The resulting measurements of the electron densities in the nighttime ionosphere as well as the neutral composition and temperature in the thermosphere, when combined with current modeling capabilities, will advance our understanding of Thermosphere-Ionosphere (T-I) forcing. GOLD will provide the first global- scale "snapshot" of temperature that can be compared with the coincident "snapshot" of composition changes to understand how these two major parameters simultaneously react to the various forcing mechanisms. GOLD will continue observing the same longitudes from the daytime into the night allowing the relationship between presunset conditions in the T-I system and the longitudinal dependence of variations in the ionosphere to be separated. One question that GOLD will address is: do vertical ion drifts, as manifested in the structure of the equatorial anomaly, affect the occurrence of ionospheric irregularities? Solar and geomagnetic forcing produces variations in the structure of the equatorial ionosphere at night (equatorial anomaly) and the occurrence of irregularities within the ionosphere. These ionospheric density variations, with scale sizes ranging from hundreds to tens of km, have profound effects on systems using radio frequencies. Irregularities at low latitudes are produced in the post-sunset ionosphere by the Rayleigh-Taylor (R-T) instability. The growth of these R-T instabilities into large-scale plasma bubbles has an optical signature and is the greatest source of ionospheric irregularities at low latitudes. Simulations of GOLD observations indicate that bubbles on the order of 25 km will be observable. At low latitudes, our understanding is currently based on relatively limited geographic coverage, and even that understanding is not well connected to the global-scale variations/changes. In particular, the longitude dependence of the pre-reversal enhancement in upward E×B drift velocity, which initiates the R-T instability mechanism, is poorly known. The relationships between these vertical E×B drifts, as manifested in the structure of the equatorial anomaly, and the occurrence of ionospheric irregularities will be established using observations from GOLD. Show less