Real Time Magnetic Field Line Tracing In The Magnetosphere Via Adaptive Error Bounded Integration

TL;DR

This paper presents a real-time, adaptive error-bounded integration method for magnetic field line tracing in the magnetosphere, enabling accurate footprint mapping and connectivity analysis with robust event detection.

Contribution

It introduces an error-bounded adaptive integration approach using embedded Runge-Kutta methods for efficient and precise field line tracing in magnetospheric studies.

Findings

Validated against analytic dipole models

Successfully applied to IGRF-based geomagnetic configurations

Enables real-time footprint localization

Abstract

Field line tracing is one of the fundamental computational tools used in the study of the magnetosphere, which helps in many areas including footprint mapping, connectivity analysis and real-time visualisation. This note describes an implementation approach to error-bounded adaptive integration of the field line differential equation (ODE), where an embedded Runge-Kutta pair is used in conjunction with event detection, allowing robust localisation of footprint locations on spacecraft. The method is validated against an analytic dipole field model as well as an international geomagnetic reference field (IGRF)-based geomagnetic configuration.