Canadian Geospace Monitoring
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Canadian Geospace Monitoring (CGSM) is a Canadian space science program that was initiated in 2005. CGSM is funded primarily by the Canadian Space Agency, and consists of networks of imagers, meridian scanning photometers, riometers, magnetometers, digital ionosondes, and High Frequency SuperDARN radars. The overarching objective of CGSM is to provide synoptic observations of the spatio-temporal evolution of the ionospheric thermodynamics and electrodynamics at auroral and polar latitudes over a large region of Canada.
The interaction between the solar wind and the Earth's magnetic field has a number of consequences. In brief, these are the formation of the terrestrial Magnetosphere, the provision of energy and matter to the [magnetosphere], and the powering of large-scale electric currents and the closely related phenomenon of the aurora. Near-Earth space physical processes are of interest for economic reasons and for what we can learn about our environment and the cosmos. These processes are connected along the magnetic field to the Earth's ionosphere, where they lead to the aurora, heating, modification of composition, and large-scale plasma motions. All of these ionospheric processes are interesting in their own right. In addition, there is an increasing understanding of the correspondence between ionospheric processes and processes going on further out in near-Earth space. In this way, observations of the ionospheric processes can be used to in turn remote sense dynamics in near-Earth space.
The interaction is significant at sub-auroral, auroral, and polar latitudes where large regions of the magnetosphere are mapped along the magnetic field into relatively small regions of the ionosphere, and where the magnetospheric dynamics are controlled primarily by the plasma rather than the magnetic field. This organization is actually by magnetic rather than by geographic latitude (see Baker and Wing,[1] and references therein for a description of magnetic vs. geographic coordinates). The aurora, for example, is most frequently observed at magnetic latitudes between roughly 60 and 80 degrees (see Eather[2]). In the northern hemisphere Canada has the largest land mass at the magnetic latitudes. As a consequence of this so-called "Canadian-advantage", Canada has been a world-leader in ground-based auroral and ionospheric research for decades.
CGSM was envisaged as a national program aimed at obtaining world-class ionospheric observations, and with those in hand directly studying ionospheric dynamics and indirectly the magnetospheric dynamics. It was developed with the guiding principles embodied in five grand challenge science themes. In summary, the science themes are related to the reconnection and convection cycle, magnetospheric instabilities, the formation of the aurora, and the acceleration, transport, and loss of magnetospheric plasma.
