Properties of Relativistic Bouncing Microbursts

Microbursts are short duration intensifications in precipitating electron flux that are believed to be a significant contributor to electron losses in the magnetosphere. Microbursts have been observed in the form of bouncing electron packets, which offer a unique opportunity to study their properties and importance as a loss process. We present a collection of bouncing microbursts observed by the HILT instrument on SAMPEX from 1994 to 2004. We analyze the locations of the bouncing microbursts in L and MLT and find they align well with the properties of relativistic microbursts as a whole. We find that the majority of bouncing microbursts observed by SAMPEX have scale sizes of similar to 30 km at the point of observation, or similar to 300 km when mapped to the magnetic equator. The time separation between the peaks of these bouncing microbursts is usually either half a bounce period or a whole bounce period. A large collection of bouncing microbursts from SAMPEX are found A distribution of scale sizes for bouncing microbursts shows that most are a few tens of kilometers in size There are roughly equal numbers of one way and two way bouncing microbursts observed in this study