A Catalog of Dispersive Ionospheric and Plasmaspheric Arcs from Cislunar and Lunar-surface GNSS Radio Occultations
Abstract
This dataset is a catalog of 263 dispersive arcs induced by ionospheric and plasmaspheric occultation observed in GNSS signals recorded by the Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment (LuGRE) payload during Blue Ghost Mission 1 (BGM1), in cislunar space and on the lunar surface. Occultation arcs are identified and classified as ingress, egress or tangent by combining independently GPS and Galileo dual-frequency observables and computing the rate of the total electron content (ROT) and ROT index (ROTI), and are validated through a geometric criterion based on the grazing altitude of the tangent point. No distinction is made between the ionospheric and plasmaspheric contributions to each arc, which is treated as a single dispersive signature. For each arc, the catalog provides timing, grazing altitude, summary ROT/ROTI/ΔSTEC attributes, the geomagnetic activity level, and time series of leveled slant total electron content (STEC), not corrected for instrumental biases, ROT, ROTI, tangent-point position and local time. The HDF5 (Hierarchical Data Format version 5) file contains a header with dataset-wide metadata and per-class statistics, and one entry per arc. It enables rapid selection of occultation arcs for statistical studies and targeted analyses, and complements ground-based and low Earth orbit radio-occultation data during the declining phase of solar cycle 25.
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BibTeX
@misc{fiorina2026catalog,
title = {{A Catalog of Dispersive Ionospheric and Plasmaspheric Arcs from Cislunar and Lunar-surface GNSS Radio Occultations}},
author = {Francesco Fiorina and Alex Minetto and Rebecca Ghidoni and Marco Guerra and Claudio Cesaroni and Luca Spogli and Andrea Nardin and Fabio Dovis},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.28695},
eprint = {2610.28695},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28695},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - A Catalog of Dispersive Ionospheric and Plasmaspheric Arcs from Cislunar and Lunar-surface GNSS Radio Occultations
AU - Francesco Fiorina
AU - Alex Minetto
AU - Rebecca Ghidoni
AU - Marco Guerra
AU - Claudio Cesaroni
AU - Luca Spogli
AU - Andrea Nardin
AU - Fabio Dovis
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/20
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.28695
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28695
AB - This dataset is a catalog of 263 dispersive arcs induced by ionospheric and plasmaspheric occultation observed in GNSS signals recorded by the Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment (LuGRE) payload during Blue Ghost Mission 1 (BGM1), in cislunar space and on the lunar surface. Occultation arcs are identified and classified as ingress, egress or tangent by combining independently GPS and Galileo dual-frequency observables and computing the rate of the total electron content (ROT) and ROT index (ROTI), and are validated through a geometric criterion based on the grazing altitude of the tangent point. No distinction is made between the ionospheric and plasmaspheric contributions to each arc, which is treated as a single dispersive signature. For each arc, the catalog provides timing, grazing altitude, summary ROT/ROTI/ΔSTEC attributes, the geomagnetic activity level, and time series of leveled slant total electron content (STEC), not corrected for instrumental biases, ROT, ROTI, tangent-point position and local time. The HDF5 (Hierarchical Data Format version 5) file contains a header with dataset-wide metadata and per-class statistics, and one entry per arc. It enables rapid selection of occultation arcs for statistical studies and targeted analyses, and complements ground-based and low Earth orbit radio-occultation data during the declining phase of solar cycle 25.
ER -