187 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 introduces the MMEDR-Autonomous framework, a unified system integrating a learning-based optical navigation network, a reinforcement learning-based guidance approach, and a hardware-in-the-loop testbed to enhance autonomous rendezvous and docking for on-orbit servicing and debris removal missions.
This paper presents a unified framework for autonomous cislunar space domain awareness that optimizes sensor architecture and tasking strategies using the Tree of Parzen Estimators and mutual information, respectively, while employing a multiplicative unscented Kalman filter to manage the complex non-linear dynamics of orbit-attitude state estimation.
By combining Juno/Waves observations with 3D geometrical simulations, this study constrains the generation mechanisms of Jovian narrowband radio emissions (nKOM and nLF), identifying them as primarily fundamental plasma frequency emissions with distinct propagation modes (O-mode at high latitudes and X-mode at low latitudes) and suggesting a potential coexistence of linear and nonlinear generation processes for nLF.
This paper presents a uniform analysis of ten Ground Level Enhancement events, revealing a clear monotonic decline in initial proton anisotropy with increasing magnetic connection angle and demonstrating that magnetic connectivity and interplanetary transport, rather than eruption magnitude, dominate the directional properties of early relativistic solar particles.
By applying a new 3D geometrical modeling method to Juno/Waves observations, this study identifies the generation mechanism and beaming of Jovian nKOM as plasma emissions produced at the local plasma frequency and directed along decreasing frequency gradients near the Io plasma torus, while distinguishing between ordinary mode emissions at high latitudes and extraordinary mode emissions at low latitudes.
This study utilizes GRAS/Geant4 simulations to characterize background count rates in low Earth orbiting Cherenkov detectors, demonstrating that while coincidence techniques effectively mitigate trapped particle interference to enable detailed spectral analysis of Ground-Level Enhancements, significant background rates persist in the South Atlantic Anomaly.
High-resolution kinetic simulations reveal that collisionless Kelvin-Helmholtz instability drives localized plasma mixing primarily through vortex advection and magnetic reconnection, with ions mixing more effectively than electrons, which remain largely constrained to magnetic field lines.
This report presents a new empirical model derived from Polar mission data and scaled by GPS in-situ measurements to characterize the dynamic trapped proton environment in Medium-Earth Orbit (2000–2010), demonstrating that it provides more accurate statistical flux estimates and captures temporal variations better than the standard AP8 model.
By integrating multi-mission data from NASA's MMS and ESA's Cluster missions, this study demonstrates how shock-generated hot flow anomalies transmit through Earth's quasi-parallel bow shock to confine and further accelerate electrons to relativistic energies via betatron mechanisms, while simultaneously driving high-speed jets that expand the spatial domain of particle acceleration.
This study analyzes current sheets in high-resolution 2D incompressible MHD turbulence simulations where tearing instability generates plasmoids, revealing that while power-law scaling relations exist between sheet dimensions and Lundquist numbers, the lack of correlation between sheet shape and turbulence eddy structure cautions against applying the scale-dependent dynamic alignment model to current sheet analysis.