The Sounding of the Cleft Ion Fountain Energization Region (SCIFER) experiment was conducted to investigate the ionospheric origin of the Cleft Ion Fountain (CIF). In the previous decade several high altitude spacecraft studies concluded that the CIF is the principal source of mass for the magnetosphere, especially O+. Yet the ionospheric cleft in the altitude range between 1000 km and 2000 km had not been explored since the ISIS spacecraft experiments in the 1970s. SCIFER was designed to fill that gap with instrumentation that provided continuous spatial/temporal resolution two orders of magnitude better than that achieved by previous orbiting spacecraft.
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Kintner et al. (1996) studied this question.
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