{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/measuring-the-earth-s-synchrotron-emission","title":"Measuring the Earth's Synchrotron Emission from Radiation Belts with a Lunar Near Side Radio Array","arxiv_id":"1912.04482","date":"2019-12-10","proceeding":null,"authors":["Alexander Hegedus","Quentin Nenon","Antoine Brunet","Justin Kasper","Angelica Sicard","Baptiste Cecconi","Robert MacDowall","Daniel Baker"],"abstract":"The high kinetic energy electrons that populate the Earth's radiation belts emit synchrotron emissions because of their interaction with the planetary magnetic field. A lunar near side array would be uniquely positioned to image this emission and provide a near real time measure of how the Earth's radiation belts are responding to the current solar input. The Salammbo code is a physical model of the dynamics of the three-dimensional phase-space electron densities in the radiation belts, allowing the prediction of 1 keV to 100 MeV electron distributions trapped in the belts. This information is put into a synchrotron emission simulator which provides the brightness distribution of the emission up to 1 MHz from a given observation point. Using Digital Elevation Models from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA) data, we select a set of locations near the Lunar sub-Earth point with minimum elevation variation over various sized patches where we simulate radio receivers to create a synthetic aperture. We consider all realistic noise sources in the low frequency regime. We then use a custom CASA code to image and process the data from our defined array, using SPICE to align the lunar coordinates with the Earth. We find that for a moderate lunar surface electron density of 250/cm^3, the radiation belts may be detected every 12-24 hours with a 16384 element array over a 10 km diameter circle. Changing electron density can make measurements 10x faster at lunar night, and 10x slower at lunar noon.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.04482v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.04482v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"measuring-the-earth-s-synchrotron-emission","repo_url":"https://github.com/alexhege/LunarSynchrotronArray","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"tf","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}