Caption: 
SWAP gathered these plasma observations just after New Horizons’ inbound crossing of Jupiter’s magnetopause late on Day of Year (DOY) 56, through closest approach at about 32 Jovian radii, and back down the magnetotail to about 2,500 Jovian radii.  The schematic diagram (top panel) shows the plasma disk near Jupiter and large plasmoids (colored) moving down the magnetotail, past the New Horizons spacecraft. The five spectrograms cover the five intervals numbered in the schematic. In general, the magnetotail becomes more disturbed with increasing variability in ion flux and flow speed with greater distances. Starting on DOY 132, New Horizons crossed back and forth between the magnetotail and deep magnetosheath (white intervals in bottom panel).

Credit: 
Southwest Research Institute