Los Alamos instrument flies aboard IMAGE satellite

Contact: Nancy Ambrosiano, nwa@lanl.gov, (505) 665-4610 (00-044)

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LOS ALAMOS, N.M., March 28, 2000 -- When a Boeing Delta II rocket blasted skyward Saturday, among the items in its satellite payload was a device about the size of an overnight bag. Dubbed MENA, for Medium Energy Neutral Atom imager, the 10-pound sensor developed by Los Alamos National Laboratory will work with similar devices aboard the IMAGE satellite to provide the first global images of the major plasma regions and boundaries of the Earth's magnetosphere. These sensors also will study the reactions of these charged particle areas to the solar wind.

IMAGE, Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration, will spend two years in an elliptical orbit around the Earth's poles, positioning some of the most sophisticated imaging instruments ever flown in the near-Earth space environment. Southwest Research Institute manages the IMAGE project and leads the IMAGE science investigation.

IMAGE is the first satellite mission dedicated to depicting the Earth's magnetosphere, the region of space controlled by the Earth's magnetic field and containing extremely tenuous plasmas of both solar and terrestrial origin. Invisible to standard astronomical observing techniques, these populations of ions and electrons traditionally have been studied through localized measurements with charged particle detectors, magnetometers and electric field instruments.

Instead of such in-situ measurements, IMAGE will employ a variety of imaging techniques to "see the invisible" and to produce the first comprehensive global images of the plasma populations in the inner magnetosphere. The MENA, whose sensor concept was developed by David McComas, head of Los Alamos' Center for Space Science and Exploration, is one of three devices capturing data on energetic neutral atoms.

Neutral atom imaging takes advantage of rare charge-exchange collisions between magnetospheric ions and atoms that have escaped from Earth's atmosphere. The neutral atoms created by these collisions are collected from remote locations to create images of the magnetosphere. A team of approximately 15 Los Alamos scientists and technicians from the Center and the Space and Atmospheric Sciences group has been working on MENA for nearly three years.

Images are available at:
http://sprg.ssl.berkeley.edu/image/welcome.html
http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/ltc/poetry_image/

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