Data and Code Set for "Measuring the Earth's Synchrotron Emission from Radiation Belts with a Lunar Near Side Radio Array"

This is the README for the LunarSynchrotronArray package, maintained by Dr. Alex Hegedus alexhege@umich.edu This code repository corresponds to the Hegedus et al. 2020 (accepted) Radio Science paper, "Measuring the Earth's Synchrotron Emission from Radiation Belts with a Lunar Near Side Radio Array". The arxiv link for the paper is https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.04482. The DOI link is https://doi.org/10.1029/2019RS006891 ;The Earth's Ionosphere is home to a large population of energetic electrons that live in the balance of many factors including input from the Solar wind, and the influence of the Earth's magnetic field. These energetic electrons emit radio waves as they traverse Earth's magnetosphere, leading to short‐lived, strong radio emissions from local regions, as well as persistent weaker emissions that act as a global signature of the population breakdown of all the energetic electrons. Characterizing this weaker emission (Synchrotron Emission) would lead to a greater understanding of the energetic electron populations on a day to day level. A radio array on the near side of the Moon would always be facing the Earth, and would well suited for measuring its low frequency radio emissions. In this work we simulate such a radio array on the lunar near side, to image this weaker synchrotron emission. The specific geometry and location of the test array were made using the most recent lunar maps made by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. This array would give us unprecedented day to day knowledge of the electron environment around our planet, providing reports of Earth's strong and weak radio emissions, giving both local and global information. ;This set of codes should guide you through making the figures in the paper, as well as hopefully being accessible enough for changing the code for your own array. I would encourage you to please reach out to collaborate if that is the case! Requirements: ; CASA 4.7.1 (or greater?) built on python 2.7 Example link for Red Hat 7 https://casa.nrao.edu/download/distro/casa/release/el7/casa-release-4.7.1-el7.tar.gz Users may follow this guide to download and install the correct version of CASA for their system https://casa.nrao.edu/casadocs/casa-5.5.0/introduction/obtaining-and-installing CASA executables should be fairly straightforward to extract from the untarred files. gcc 4.8.5 or above (or below?) GCC installation instructions can be found here: https://gcc.gnu.org/install/ SPICE (I use cspice here) https://naif.jpl