The Relationship between Solar Wind Charge Exchange Soft X-ray Emission and the Tangent Direction of Magnetopause in an XMM–Newton Event
, Tianran Sun 1,*, Jennifer A. Carter 3, Wenhao Liu 4, Steve Sembay 3, Li Ji 4 and Chi Wang 1,2,*
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
This essay deals with a XMM-Newton observation of the SNR DA530, from which the authors extracted X-ray background data useful to constrain their models of the Earth's magnetosphere. This essay is also useful to design the forthcoming space mission SMILE, which will be dedicated to the soft X-ray observation of the magnetosphere. The work is well designed and done, the conclusions are supported by the data. I have no objection about its publication. No specific comment on the text.
Author Response
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Reviewer 2 Report
In this manuscript the authors analyzed a magnetospheric solar wind charge exchange soft-X ray (SX) emission event detected by XMM-Newton. They used signals from X-ray cameras with appropriate calibration and appropriate filtering for selection of the X-ray events and noise removal. After further processing for compensation for the background and residual contamination signals, they obtained the count rate of 0.5-0.7 keV band that was used to characterize the X-ray intensity of magnetospheric solar wind charge exchange emission mainly coming from O7+ and O8+ in the solar wind. Comparing its time behavior with other observed quantities such as proton density, pressure and magnetic fields, they identified maximum SWCX SX count rate and maximum gradient of SWCX SX. Using a certain model for magnetopause, they concluded that the maximum SWCX SX intensity gradient tends to be tangent of the inner boundary of the magnetopause, while the maximum SWCX SX intensity to be that of its outer boundary, which are consistent with the existing MHD simulation results. The results are new and important particularly for the future development of 3D X-ray reconstruction of the magnetopause in that the tangential direction can be determined from 2D X-ray images.
The manuscript is appropriate for publication in the Magnetochemistry journal, however, the reviewer recommends the following minor amendments for the final form which may be helpful in understanding the manuscript.
- In L.94, “To analysis” should be “To analyze”.
- The description of the tasks and filter expressions, from L.97 to L.100, is rather complicated and may not be easy to understand for the readers. It might be helpful if the details of the tasks and/or filters with specific names be moved to newly established appendix section.
- In L.134, “Figure 5” should be “Figure 4”.
- In L.151, “in the panels (d) and (e),” should be “in the panels (e) and (f),”.
- Definitions (and meanings as well) of the “AE index” and ”SYM/H index”, shown in Fig.3 (e) and (f), look missing.
- The angle “\Theta” is introduced in subsection 2.2. It would be helpful for the readers to understand the geometry (2D projection) if you could show the angle “\Theta” in the right panel of Figure 6.
Author Response
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Reviewer 3 Report
In the manuscript "The relationship between solar wind charge exchange soft X-ray emission and the tangent direction of magnetopause in an
XMM-Newton event" by Yingjie Zhang et al., a magnetospheric solar wind
charge exchange (SWCX) soft X-ray event detected by XMM-Newton X-ray space observatory is analyzed in order to study the relationship between SWCX emission and the tangent direction of magnetopause.
The results of this study are useful and should be published. The introduction is informative and the conclusions are supported by the findings and results in the article. The article is well and clearly written, the figures are technically well done and the references are complete. I recommend this article for publication after correction of a couple of misprints.
Misprints:
l 33: enhanced --> is enhanced
l 59: is --> is that
Why in refs. 17, 24, 25, 29 and 41 tiles are capitalized and in all other cases not?
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
