Equatorially trapped plasmas, and the equatorial noise, were one of the most prominent features of the SCATHA observations.  

( Santol´ık seems to have picked up the trail of the equatorial noise phenomena - A recent article reports on Cluster observations of equatorial noise.)

Here is the work done with Dynamics Explorer 1 - Plasma Observations, the Density Minimum, and my one theory paper.

And my favorite paper, and the only one with any real theory - " Comparison Between Liouville’s Theorem And Observed Latitudinal Distribution Of Trapped Ions In The Plasmapause Region". Had to use data from SCATHA and DE-1 to get the complete story.

One note - I worked on this paper while back in Huntsville for a summer program (ASEE). The short version is here.  I would not mention that except for the exceptional work by Mike Pangia, which apparently never got published anywhere else.  Mike showed that the non-Maxwellian distributions we were seeing, better modeled, apparently, as kappa distributions, could be derived from first order thermodynamic principles.  The Kappa Distribution as a Variational Solution for an Infinite Plasma   A really important piece of work, that never got much further exposure.

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