Study of Very Low Frequency Solar Radio Emission Detection with Space Vector Antenna

Abstract

Solar winds，Coronal Mass Ejections（CME），interplanetary shock waves and high-energy particle events，induced by the solar radio bursts，are called as solar electromagnetic storms. The propagation，acceleration，and evolution of the CMEs，solar winds，interplanetary shock waves and high-energy particle phenomena mainly happen at the frequency range from tens of kHz to tens of MHz，which is generally considered as the frequency band of Very Low Frequency（VLF）. Though，there are already few space instruments that have investigated the VLF solar radio emissions，most of the observations are spectral measurements，and only occupied part of the whole VLF band，while the imaging observations of the VLF solar radio bursts are still blank. Based on the characteristics of the vector antenna，it can estimate the Direction Of Arrival（DOA）of the incoming waves，which can be used to locate and image the solar radio bursts（Type Ⅱ&Ⅲ）. So all the latest space VLF radio instruments adopt the tripole antenna can do the observations. In this paper，in order to investigate the detection of the solar radio bursts with the space VLF radio explorer，different algorithms are proposed to detect the solar radio bursts with a tripole vector antenna，and simulations have been done with some space VLF radio observations for these algorithms under different conditions. The simulation results show that the vector antenna can locate the radio bursts with a degree-level accuracy. The capability of detecting the solar radio bursts is also analyzed in further for the space VLF radio explorer.

Keywords

very low frequency / space explorer / solar radio burst / vector antenna