TIMESS will address the following specific science objectives related to turbulence:
- To improve the physical insight on turbulence by investigating the topology of the energy transfer in the solar wind, as well as in the terrestrial and Venusian magnetosheaths, and to search for quantitative measures for coherent structures interaction;
- To improve the understanding of the dissipation mechanisms, in the solar wind and planetary magnetosheaths.
The specific science objectives related to intermittency are:
- To identify the sources of intermittency in the solar wind and the planetary magnetosheaths;
- To advance the understanding of the coupling between the solar wind and the planetary plasmas by investigating the similarities and differences of the solar wind and magnetosheath intermittency.
The specific science objectives outlined above are structured into several concrete objectives:
O1. To compute a relevant set of parameters to describe turbulence and intermittency in the solar wind and the planetary plasma environment: Power Spectral Density - PSD spectral exponent, moments of the PDFs (like the flatness), the Local Intermittency Measure - LIM;
O2. To investigate the effects of typical discontinuities on the spectral and wavelet analysis of fluctuations;
O3. To evaluate and understand the dawn-dusk asymmetries in the turbulent and intermittency spectrum of fluctuations in the magnetosheath of the Earth and possibly Venus;
O4. To study the effects of turbulence and intermittency on the dynamics of particles and plasma at the magnetopause of the Earth.