Space Physics Seminar winter-2015

As recently as 1980 the polar cap was thought to be a dark benign uninteresting backwater of near-earth space. As satellites became increasingly used for communication and navigation, unexpected and unexplained outages of these planned capabilities in polar regions changed all that. As sensors of increasing sensitivity populated high latitude and polar regions, they unveiled a sky filled with blazing aurora (visible to image intensified systems), and transient jets of plasma flow that significantly impact earth’s space plasma and neutral upper atmosphere, even satellite drag, and disclosed a space laboratory for discovery still being richly tapped to this day. We do a brief tour of some of the more interesting natural phenomena discovered, such as the role of solar wind, magnetic reconnection, magnetosphere-ionosphere-thermosphere coupling in driving high latitude disturbances. Input-response experiments over scales of kilometers to Earth radii are found to require integration of simple concepts of electrodynamics, aeronomy, and hydrodynamics to solve decade long challenges. We follow some highlights of what we have learned, and what we hope to, with new polar research facilities, networks of which span transpolar distances. The challenges engage ground based and space borne research internationally, the national CEDAR program, and ground-breaking work within UCLA.