Particle Signatures Observed by Geotail at 9-30 Re and Mapping of Auroral Regions to the Magnetosphere Without Field-Line Models

The Geotail spacecraft has often observed a rapid change of particle signatures at a geocentric distance around 10-15 Re. As the spacecraft approached the near-Earth region, particle spectra showing a low temperature, a small particle flux, and a large fluctuation in the magnetotail changed to those with a high temperature, a large flux, and a small fluctuation in the near-Earth region. This change often occurred rapidly as if there was a sharp boundary between the tail plasma sheet and the near-Earth plasma sheet. In the present paper, we call this boundary "near-Earth PS boundary (NEPS boundary)." As pointed out by recent studies, the region between the tail plasma sheet and the near-Earth plasma sheet may be a key to solving problems on dynamics of the magnetosphere [Shiokawa et al., 1998] and to studying chaotic behavior of magnetospheric particles [Zelenyi et al., 2000, 2002]. In this paper, we investigate the position of the NEPS boundary in detail and present a map showing its occurrence on the equatorial plane. We also examine characteristics of the NEPS boundary and indicate that they are very similar to characteristics of the equatorward boundary of the so-called "Wall Region" [Ashour-Abdalla et al, 1992] or "Ion Gap" [Bosqued et al, 1993; Delcourt et al., 1996], which has been observed at low altitudes. We compare the NEPS boundary with the equatorward boundary of the Wall Region (Ion Gap) identified by the low-altitude satellite Akebono. It is concluded that the boundary of the Wall Region (Ion Gap) is the field-aligned projection of the NEPS boundary detected by Geotail in the magnetosphere. This conclusion enables us to map the key region (10-15 Re) to the auroral altitudes. The result of the mapping demonstrates that the key region is projected on the latitudes of 65-70 degrees at auroral altitudes. Finally, we discuss a new method to map auroral regions to the magnetosphere without using field line models but using observed boundaries. It is suggested that this method can provide a more accurate projection of auroral regions than the method using field-line models can, especially in the radial (latitudinal) direction.