Sd. Bale et al., SUPRATHERMAL ELECTRONS ASSOCIATED WITH A PLASMA DISCHARGE ON AN ACTIVE SOUNDING ROCKET EXPERIMENT, J GEO R-S P, 100(A12), 1995, pp. 23749-23754
Electrons with energies up to 600 eV are observed with the retarding p
otential analyzer (RPA) instrument aboard the Several Compatible Exper
iments (SCEX) III sounding rocket. The electrons are concomitant with
high-energy (2-6 keV) electron gun injections and also evidence themse
lves by luminosity observed with 3805 Angstrom and 3914 Angstrom photo
meters. Both the collected electron flux and luminosity measurements a
re strongly nonlinear with gun injection current. For a typical event,
the electron distribution is similar to laboratory beam-plasma discha
rge (BPD) distributions reported by Sharp (1982) and when backed by HF
electric field observations (Goerke et al., 1992; Llobet et al., 1985
), the BPD mechanism becomes a most likely explanation. Strong turbule
nce theories of BPD predict a power law tail in the electron distribut
ion, and we compare our spectral index with some previous observations
.