179 papers
Space physics explores the dynamic environment surrounding our planet and the wider solar system, focusing on how charged particles, magnetic fields, and solar winds interact with celestial bodies. This field helps us understand phenomena like auroras, space weather that can disrupt satellites, and the fundamental behavior of plasma in the vacuum of space. It bridges the gap between astronomy and particle physics, revealing the invisible forces that shape our cosmic neighborhood.
At Gist.Science, we process every new preprint in this category as it appears on arXiv, ensuring you get immediate access to the latest research. For each paper, we provide both a detailed technical summary for experts and a plain-language explanation that makes complex concepts understandable for everyone. Below are the latest space physics papers from arXiv, curated and simplified for your reading.
This paper presents a multidisciplinary design optimization framework using OpenMDAO and Dymos that simultaneously optimizes low-thrust trajectories and spacecraft power systems for asteroid orbit insertion, explicitly coupling variable-specific impulse Hall thruster performance with time-varying solar power availability to overcome the limitations of traditional simplifying assumptions.
This paper develops a moment-based quasilinear theory to demonstrate that cold electron populations drive secondary instabilities which can nearly completely damp parallel-propagating whistler chorus waves, thereby limiting their amplitude and explaining the rare simultaneous observation of high-amplitude field-aligned and oblique whistler waves in Earth's magnetosphere.
This study utilizes an expanded catalog of 1976 interplanetary coronal mass ejection events observed from 0.07 to 5.4 au to demonstrate that their magnetic field evolution follows a single power law with an exponent of approximately -1.57, while revealing that a two-exponent multipole model is required to reconcile these interplanetary measurements with solar source field strengths.
By challenging the traditional view that Earth's life is an uninformative data point and applying Daniel Whitmire's corrected anthropic reasoning, this study establishes a pessimistic lower limit on the number of extraterrestrial civilizations that effectively excludes the possibility of humanity being alone in the observable universe, yielding a 97.6% probability that other communicating civilizations exist.
This paper presents a methodology for inferring magnetic polarities of far-side solar active regions using helioseismic signatures and Hales' law, thereby enabling the creation of polarity-resolved far-side magnetograms to improve full-Sun magnetic modeling and space-weather forecasting.
This paper proposes a novel Model Predictive Control framework for solar sails that effectively manages reaction wheel momentum and attitude by integrating active mass translation and reflectivity control devices through tailored discretization, PWM-inspired quantization, and an iterative backwards-in-time optimization approach to handle coupled nonlinear dynamics and discrete actuator constraints.
This paper introduces ARCANE, a novel framework that achieves robust, early detection of interplanetary coronal mass ejections in streaming solar wind data by leveraging a ResUNet++ machine learning model, which significantly outperforms threshold-based baselines while maintaining high performance even with real-time data constraints.
This paper presents a comprehensive linear and numerical analysis of the two-dimensional Kelvin-Helmholtz instability in collisionless plasmas with anisotropic pressure, revealing that the magnetohydrodynamic limit yields significantly larger growth rates, current densities, and magnetic island formation compared to the anisotropic CGL regime where energy is diverted into pressure anisotropies.
This paper proposes a computationally efficient and fuel-optimal model predictive control strategy for areostationary Mars orbit satellites that utilizes a fuel-free natural motion trajectory as a reference to maintain station within one degree of longitude while accounting for Mars' complex gravitational perturbations.
This numerical study demonstrates that MHD turbulent simulations using the expanding box model can reproduce the observed 1/R radial temperature profile of the slow solar wind between 0.2 and 1 AU, provided the turbulence begins with a Mach number of unity and a quasi-2D spectral anisotropy, albeit with limitations imposed by the modest Reynolds numbers achievable at such high Mach speeds.