manuscript submitted to Radio Science Measuring the Earth's Synchrotron Emission from Radiation Belts with a Lunar Near Side Radio Array Alexander Hegedus1, Quentin Nenon2, Antoine Brunet3, Justin Kasper1, Ang´elicaSicard3, Baptiste Cecconi4, Robert MacDowall5, Daniel Baker6 1University of Michigan, Department of Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA 2Space Sciences Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA 3ONERA / DPHY, Universit´ede Toulouse, F-31055 Toulouse France 4LESIA, Observatoire de Paris, Universit PSL, CNRS, Sorbonne Universit, Univ. de Paris, Meudon, France 5NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, USA 6University of Colorado Boulder, Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, Boulder, Colorado, USA Key Points: • Synchrotron emission between 500-1000 kHz has a total flux density of 1.4-2 Jy at lunar distances • A 10 km radio array with 16000 elements could detect the emission in 12-24 hours with moderate noise • Changing electron density can make detections 10x faster at lunar night, 10x slower at lunar noon arXiv:1912.04482v1 [physics.space-ph] 10 Dec 2019 Corresponding author: Alexander Hegedus,
[email protected] {1{ manuscript submitted to Radio Science Abstract The high kinetic energy electrons that populate the Earth's radiation belts emit synchrotron emissions because of their interaction with the planetary magnetic field. A lunar near side array would be uniquely positioned to image this emission and provide a near real time measure of how the Earth's radiation belts are responding to the current solar in- put. The Salammb^ocode is a physical model of the dynamics of the three-dimensional phase-space electron densities in the radiation belts, allowing the prediction of 1 keV to 100 MeV electron distributions trapped in the belts.