Multi-Spacecraft Observatory Data Analysis Techniques: Uncertainty Quantification & Comparison

Abstract

The future NASA mission HelioSwarm will launch a configuration of nine co-orbiting spacecraft whose goal is to study basic plasma processes which are present in near-Earth plasmas. Each of these spacecraft will have a magnetometer instrument which makes in-situ measurements of magnetic fields. As magnetic fields play a critical role in the dynamics of plasmas, inferring magnetic field structure across the HelioSwarm observatory is a necessary step towards characterizing fundamental plasma processes. In this dissertation we examine mathematical techniques that can be used to either infer magnetic field topology and statistics across a multi-spacecraft configuration, or to identify wave-like signatures using a multi-spacecraft observatory. While previous spatial interpolation techniques have used data from the four and five-spacecraft missions of the past, we must develop new techniques to utilize in-situ measurements from future many-spacecraft observatories, such as HelioSwarm. We develop interpolation techniques that can be applied to reconstruct the magnetic field around configurations containing arbitrary numbers of spacecraft. We also compare the effectiveness of these methods when applied in physically realistic (spacecraft configuration & magnetic field) scenarios. Because waves are also fundamental to the study of plasma energy transfer, heating, and turbulence, we examine a method of decomposing magnetic field measurements into a distribution of waves to bolster our understanding of plasma dynamics. By using results from numerical simulations, we create an interpretable model (for method error) that can be leveraged to expand the wave identification sensitivity range of a fixed configuration of (arbitrary number of) spacecraft.