RADIAL EVOLUTION OF SOLAR WIND TURBULENCE DURING EARTH AND ULYSSES ALIGNMENT OF 2007 AUGUST

At the end of 2007 August, during the minimum of solar cycle 23, a lineup of Earth and Ulysses occurred, giving the opportunity to analyze, for the first time, the same plasma sample at different observation points, namely at 1 and 1.4 AU. In particular, it allowed us to study the radial evolution of solar wind turbulence typical of fast wind streams as proposed in a Coordinated Investigation Programme for the International Heliophysical Year. This paper describes both the macrostructure and the fluctuations at small scales of this event. We find that soon after detecting the same fast stream, the Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) observed a change of magnetic polarity being the interplanetary current sheet located between the orbits of the two spacecraft. Moreover, we observe that the compression region formed in front of the fast stream detected at ACE’s location evolves in a fast forward shock at Ulysses’ orbit. On the other hand, small-scale analysis shows that turbulence is evolving. The presence of a shift of the frequency break separating the injection range from the inertial range toward lower frequencies while distance increases is a clear indication that nonlinear interactions are at work. Moreover, we observe that intermittency, as measured by the flatness factor, increases with distance. This study confirms previous analyses performed using Helios observations of the same fast wind streams at different heliocentric distances, allowing us to relax about the hypothesis of the stationarity of the source regions adopted in previous studies. Consequently, any difference noticed in the solar wind parameters would be ascribed to radial (time) evolution.