Using IMAGE Data for Observe the Plasma Density Distribution of the Geomagnetic Equatorial Plane

The IMAGE satellite has been observed the Earth’s plasmasphere for 5 years, it provides a large quantity of practicable data for the plasmaspheric research. However, IMAGE data had the three problems: ‘the earth shelter’, ‘the sunlight shadow’ and ‘the lack of data’, so the traditional CT methods can not directly reconstruct the earth’s plasmasphere. In this paper, by using the earth's magnetic field model and starting from the physical properties of the Earth’s plasmasphere, we establish a new EUV imaging model which associates with the surface density of the Earth's magnetic equator and the projection data. Then we use an ART-type technique to inverse compute this model and acquire the density distribution of geomagnetic equatorial plane. This method realized a 3D plasmaspheric density distribution was computed from the single angle of the EUV observed images. In addition, we evaluated the result by using the simulated data and the IMAGE data; it was show that the method is feasible and effective.