O ver the past few years, TV audiences have become accustomed to weathermen showing them radar pictures of storms marching across the viewing area. In a little more than a year, space scientists hope they'll be able to do the same as space storms hit the Earth's magnetosphere. A region of inner magnetosphere, the plasmasphere, consists of relatively dense ionized gas which rotates with the Earth.
Carpenter is a pioneer in using radio to dissect the magnetosphere.
Scientists had expected that plasmas would just gradually fade away with distance from the Earth. The plasmapause changes with the solar wind and other events in space. A few of its average properties are well known, but the manner in which it changes or relates to other geophysical boundaries in space remains a mystery. The plasmasphere is a region circling the equatorial plane of Earth, and the plasmapause is the boundary surrounding the plasmasphere. RPI will work like Doppler radar, sending radio pulses into the magnetosphere, and measuring the echoes.