Multi-spacecraft scientific missions for space physics have been flown since the 1960s with early missions such as IMP, VELA, Helios, and ISEE. Much of the success in understanding the Earth's magnetosphere and ionosphere and the physics and evolution of the solar wind has come from multi-spacecraft measurements. Multi-spacecraft measurements have been essential for studying the transport of plasma and energy, the motion of boundaries, the evolution of structure, the growth of instabilities, particle injections, and the rudiments of cross-scale coupling, and they have allowed accurate determinations of the orientation of plasma boundaries and current sheets, the geometry of magnetic field structures, the remote connections along magnetic field lines, and the direction of plasma-wave vectors.
Multispacecraft missions continue into the present including planned constellation-type missions plus the use of the Heliophysics Great Observatory, a collection of data from diverse spacecraft throughout the heliosphere. Modern four-spacecraft volumetric measurements are enabling the measurement of the gradients, divergences and curls of the vector fields.
Demanded by the crucial need to understand multi-scale, multi-region physics of the coupled solar wind-magnetosphere-ionosphere system, and building on these previous successes, a number of future multi-spacecraft constellation missions for the magnetosphere, ionosphere, and solar wind are actively being planned, including multi-spacecraft radio tomography.
This Research Topic aims to give for the first time a complete overview on Multispacecraft Measurements for Space Physics, summarizing the state-of-the-field and current case studies on the topic, as well as challenging the community on what it has still to be discovered and unveiled in the future.
We welcome
(a) Reviews and Mini-Reviews that discuss and summarize the past discoveries.
(b) Original Research, Methods and Brief Research Report, as well as Reviews and Mini-Reviews, that present the state of the art and the ongoing studies.
(c) Hypothesis & Theory, Perspective and Opinion on the challenges and prospective for the future.
The authors are invited to look at the details of each article type
here This Research Topic is part of the "Past, Present and Future" collection series. Other titles in the series are:
- Past, Present and Future of Gravitational Wave Research
- Past, Present and Future of Stellar Magnetic Activity: The Solar-Like Stars