The course consists of lectures, student presentations and ‘hands on’ projects.
The lectures cover both theoretical foundations and practical aspects of some instruments and experimental methods, including particle and field measurements on space probes, and ground based optical and radar measurements. The student presentations will require participants to work with original papers (typically several of them) in order to prepare a seminar for the colleagues. A number of relevant topics are suggested, with a reference list. ‘Hands on’ activities involve working with some hardware, software and data.
The aim of the course is to give the students a working knowledge of various experimental techniques and measurement methods used in the ground based and satellite studies in space plasma physics. The focus is on getting both an understanding of the underlying physics and the working knowledge of the typical ranges of parameters involved, methods’ performance and technical limitations.
After completing the course, a participant should be able to
- explain the physical operation principles of experimental techniques most commonly used in space plasma physics
- interpret the typical graphical presentation of the results of various measurements, such as satellite particle and field data, ground based magnetic, optical and radar observations; know coordinate systems used in studies of the near earth space
- describe in general terms technical implementation of various measurement methods
- identify the major limitations of the methods, provide order of magnitude estimate of performance (such as sensitivity, uncertainty, integration time etc) and typical range of measured quantities
- locate information about, critically analyze and make an oral presentation on a subject of relevance to the course
- carry out simple tasks including acquisition and/or analysis of data using commercial software (such as LabView, IDL, Matlab, etc)
