Ion temperature imaging of the Earth's magnetosphere

Detection of neutral atom emission from hot plasmas has evolved to the point where it is now possible to image hot plasmas in neutral atom emission. In this paper, we review the qualitative and quantitative spatially resolved information that can be obtained from neutral atom images, e.g., hot ion transport and ion temperatures. A challenging aspect of neutral atom imaging of the earth's quiet time magnetosphere is that the combination of small neutral fluxes and spacecraft motion necessitates the development of algorithms capable of summing neutral emission obtained from different vantage points over many months to obtain statistically significant images. The image summing algorithm and typical summed images are also presented in this work.