Finding Magnetopause Standoff Distance Using a Soft X‐ray Imager: 2. Methods to Analyze 2‐D X‐ray Images

The Earth's magnetosheath and cusps are the sources of soft X‐rays. In the accompanying paper (Part 1) and this paper, we discuss the methods of finding the magnetopause position by analyzing the X‐ray images. We use the software developed for the Soft X‐ray Imager (SXI) on board the forthcoming Solar wind Magnetosphere Ionosphere Link Explorer (SMILE) mission. We show how to find the maximum SXI count rate in noisy count maps. We verify the assumption that the maximum of the X‐ray emissivity integrated along the Line‐of‐Sight (Ix) is tangent to the magnetopause. We consider two cases using two MHD models and apply different methods of magnetospheric masking. Overall, the magnetopause is located close to the maximum Ix gradient or between the maximum Ix gradient and the maximum Ix depending on the method used. But since the angular distance between the maximum Ix gradient and the maximum Ix is relatively small (about 3°), the maximum Ix might be used as an indicator of the outer boundary of a wide magnetopause layer usually obtained in MHD simulations.