A Catalog of Dispersive Ionospheric and Plasmaspheric Arcs from Cislunar and Lunar-surface GNSS Radio Occultations
physics.space-ph, astro-ph.SR, eess.SP
Submitted: 2026-10-20
Updated: 2026-10-20
Comments: 17 pages, 4 figures. Aggregated analyses from a subset of the dataset were presented at the Institute of Navigation International Technical Meeting 2026 (ION GNSS+ 2026)
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: 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
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/ Δ STEC 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.