Demonstrating HelioSwarm's Ability to Characterize Space Plasma Waves Using the Wave-Telescope Technique

Waves are a fundamental phenomenon present in plasmas. Observing the generation, propagation, and absorption of these waves will help us study the energy transfer and heating in a variety of space and astrophysical systems. The upcoming NASA mission HelioSwarm will use nine spacecraft to take the first simultaneous multi-point measurements of space plasmas at multiple scales. Using the wave-telescope (AKA k-filtering) technique HelioSwarm's measurements will allow for the calculation of the power in wavevector-and-frequency space and the characterization of the associated dispersion relations of waves present in the plasma at both MHD and ion-kinetic scales.

The wave-telescope technique has been applied to the four-spacecraft missions of CLUSTER and MMS and its effectiveness has been numerically quantified for a one-dimensional, collinear spacecraft configuration. We expand this uncertainty quantification analysis to arbitrary configurations of four spacecraft in three-dimensions. We then analyze how using data from nine spacecraft can improve the accuracy of the method, as well as expand the magnitudes of wavevectors which can be characterized.