9:00 AM - 10:30 AM
[PEM13-P08] Small-scale pulsating auroral distribution obtained with the auroral camera on the LAMP rocket
Keywords:pulsating aurora, mircroburst, rocket
At ~10:30 UT on March 5, 2022, a typical auroral break up with a negative excursion of geomagnetic east-west component of ~500 nT (Kp=4-) happened at Poker Flat, and afterward significant pulsating auroral patches with several Hz modulations appeared in the northward sky of Poker Flat. The LAMP rocket was successfully launched into and flew over the active pulsating auroral patches. AIC2 worked satisfactorily throughout the flight. The despun table worked correctly and small-scale aurora were continuously obtained by AIC2 for the first time. Auroral image data taken by AIC2 were analyzed as follows: 1) subtraction of dark count, 2) field flattering, 3) unit conversion from count to Rayleigh. From AIC-S1 data, we see significant pulsating auroral patches with sub-second modulations during the flight time of ~160-200 s, ~450-500s, and black arcs at ~600s. From AIC-S2 data, we identified the limb and large-scale auroral emission in the equatorward of auroral oval. Other onboard instruments and ground-based high-speed imagers at Poker Flat, Venetie, and Fort Yukon succeeded to observe during the flight. We compared auroral images taken by AIC2 with high-energy electrons (>100keV), low-energy electrons (several to 10 keV) and ground auroral images and found that they showed good correspondence on the main pulsating aurora (~5s) and even on the sub-second variations which is probably microbursts.