MMS FPI DES: Partial Plasma Distribution Moments from Burst Mode

NASA's Magnetospheric Multiscale mission provides partial plasma moments from the Dual Electron Spectrometer instrument. Data includes burst mode measurements at 30 millisecond resolution, alongside survey mode data at 4.5 second and 60 second resolutions. The dataset contains quantities like density_part, derived from moment integrals over a limited portion of velocity space.

Use Cases

• Modeling electron density variations based on partial density moments.
• Analyzing plasma velocity space distributions from limited integration data.
• Studying instrument state and calibration effects using included annotation parameters.
• Correlating high-resolution burst mode data with lower-resolution survey data.

Strengths

• Data includes high-resolution burst mode measurements at 30 milliseconds.
• Provides multiple temporal resolutions including 4.5 second and 60 second survey data.
• Contains specialized partial moments like density_part for focused analysis.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Data availability is partial as not all burst resolution data are downlinked per mission design.

Provenance

Source

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Collection Method

Data collected by the Fast Plasma Investigation instrument on the Magnetospheric Multiscale mission.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03-13 08:32:04.103750; freshness should be verified.