CRRES PLASMA-WAVE EXPERIMENT

The CRRES plasma wave experiment is designed to provide information on the plasma wave environment and the total plasma density in the Earth's radiation belts and throughout the CRRES orbit. This information is valuable both for studying the naturally occurring wave-particle interactions affecting the plasma and particle environment in the plasmasphere and magnetosphere as well as for studying the chemical releases. The electric field sensors for this instrument consist of two long electric dipole antennas (approximately 100 m tip-to-tip), and the magnetic field sensor is a search coil magnetometer mounted at the end of a 6-m boom. The instrument has two receivers: a 14-channel spectrum analyzer covering the frequency range from 5.6 Hz to 10 kHz and a 128-step sweep frequency receiver covering the frequency range from 100 Hz to 400 kHz. Measurements from these receivers provide the intensity of the electromagnetic and electrostatic fields as functions of frequency and time from which the emissions and wave modes can be identified and analyzed and from which the total plasma number density can be determined.