Science
HelioSwarm science is tightly aligned with NAS 2013 Heliophysics Decadal Survey and NASA SMD Priorities: Turbulence identified as a Decadal Science Goal ("Understand the origins and effects of turbulence") and a Decadal Imperative ("Implement…a multispacecraft mission to address cross-scale plasma physics").
Goal #1
Reveal the 3D spatial structure and dynamics of turbulence in a weakly collisional plasma
- Reveal how turbulent energy is transferred in most probable, undisturbed solar wind plasma and distributed as a function of scale and time
- Reveal how turbulent cascade of energy varies with background magnetic field and plasma parameters in different environments
- Quantify transfer of turbulent energy between fields, flows, and protons
- Identify thermodynamic impacts of intermittent structures on proton distributions
Goal #2
Ascertain the mutual impact of turbulence near boundaries and large-scale structures
- Determine how solar wind turbulence affects and is affected by large-scale structures
- Determine how strongly driven turbulence in the foreshock, magnetosheath, and magnetosphere differs from that in the undisturbed solar wind.
HelioSwarm's first-ever simultaneous multipoint, multiscale measurements disentangle spatial and temporal variations in solar wind plasmas that connect MHD scale turbulence with sub-ion scale heating.
