KiNET-X brings new understanding of energy and momentum transport in charged plasmas
KiNET-X brings new understanding of energy and momentum transport in charged plasmas lead image
Injected ions couple to ambient charged plasma in many real-world environments, from spacecraft thrusters exiting Earth’s atmosphere, to volcanic ejections interacting with planetary magnetic fields. NASA’s KINetic-scale Energy and momentum Transport eXperiment (KiNET-X) launched on May 17, 2021, to help physicists model these processes. By using barium releases to inject a known amount of energy and momentum into Earth’s ionosphere, KiNET-X enabled researchers to study how plasmas transport energy and momentum in the region.
Moses et al. oversaw a set of instruments aboard KiNET-X called Petite Ion Probes (PIPs), which they used to measure current and voltage in the ionospheric plasma after barium injections and calculate the trajectories of the newly ionized barium.
“This could help with models of the ionospheric response to energy and momentum inputs from different, natural sources,” said author Magdalina Moses. “The classic example is material ejected from Jupiter’s moon Io into Jupiter’s space environment.”
The background plasma temperature increased after each barium release, which the researchers found was primarily due to ion cyclotron oscillations, ions bouncing perpendicular to Earth’s magnetic field. They also noted the lower mass barium release coupled more rapidly to the ionosphere than the larger mass injection.
“The experiment was a small-scale reproduction of the Io-Jupiter auroral interactions, where heavy ions ejected from Io interact with Jupiter’s magnetosphere and ionosphere to form a small aurora on Jupiter outside the polar regions,” said Moses.
The data processing tools the team developed allowed more than one ion species in a plasma to be measured simultaneously for the first time, expanding the types of missions the PIPs can support. Ongoing analysis will provide more information about the barium releases’ structure and evolution.
Source: “Single-point in-situ measurements of thermal ions during the KiNET-X ionospheric sounding rocket mission,” by M. L. Moses, K. Lynch, P. A. Delamere, M. Lessard, R. Pfaff, M. Larsen, D. L. Hampton, M. Conde, N. P. Barnes, P. A. Damiano, A. Otto, and C. Moser-Gauthier, Physics of Plasmas (2025). The article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0253729 .
