A new inversion method of plasma density distribution of plasmasphere in the geomagnetic equatorial plane from IMAGE data Original Research Article

The plasma density distribution of plasmasphere in the geomagnetic equatorial plane can help us study the magnetosphere like plasmasphere, ionosphere and their kinetics. In this paper, we introduce a new inversion method, GE-ART, to calculate the plasma density distribution in the geomagnetic equatorial plane from the Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) data of IMAGE satellite under the assumption that the plasma density is constant along each geomagnetic field line. The new GE-ART algorithm was derived from the traditional Algebraic Reconstruction Techniques (ART) in Computed Tomography (CT) which was different from the several existing methods. In this new method, each value of the EUV image data was back-projected evenly to the geomagnetic field lines intersected by this EUV sight. A 3-D inversion matrix was produced by the contributions of all the voxels contained in the plasmasphere covered by the EUV sensor. That is, we considered that each value of the EUV image data was relative to the plasma densities of all the voxels passed through by the corresponding EUV radiation, which is the biggest difference to all the existing inversion methods. Finally, the GE-ART algorithm was evaluated by the real EUV data from the IMAGE satellite.