SUPRATHERMAL ELECTRONS ASSOCIATED WITH A PLASMA DISCHARGE ON AN ACTIVE SOUNDING ROCKET EXPERIMENT

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 .