SM038-01
Magnetic reconnection observed at Earth's bow shock

Monday, 14 December 2020: 20:30
Virtual
Shan Wang1, Li J Chen2, Naoki Bessho1,3, Michael Hesse4, Lynn B Wilson III5, Richard Eugene Denton6, Jonathan Ng7, Barbara L Giles2, Roy B Torbert8 and James L Burch9, (1)University of Maryland College Park, College Park, MD, United States, (2)NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, United States, (3)NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, United States, (4)University of Bergen, Space Plasma Physics Group, Bergen, Norway, (5)NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Heliospheric Physics Laboratory, Code 672, Greenbelt, MD, United States, (6)Dartmouth College, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Hanover, NH, United States, (7)University of Maryland College Park; NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, College Park, MD, United States, (8)Univ New Hampshire, Durham, NH, United States, (9)Southwest Research Institute San Antonio, San Antonio, TX, United States
Recorded Presentation
Abstract:
We study magnetic reconnection at the Earth’s bow shock using observations by the Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission. The reconnecting current sheets exist both in the foreshock and in the deep shock transition region. The current sheets may contain the electron outflow jet, Hall fields and Hall currents, and show energy conversion between the fields and particles, while ions do not have response. There also exists reconnecting current sheets where the ion exhaust is observed with ion acceleration and heating. The compression of the current sheets originated from the foreshock waves appears to be one mechanism of generating thin current sheets subject to reconnection.
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