
ALT Earth's MAGNETOSPHERE, cross-section; highly simplified, showing relative positions of magnetodawn, magnetonoon and magnetodusk. Simple schematic of Earth's magnetosphere, with dawn, noon and dusk sectors of the magnetosheath labeled in blue text. Figure is Figure 1. from the 2019 THEMIS Science Nuggets article: "THEMIS reveals a puzzling asymmetry in near-Earth space" by Stein Haaland Max Planck Institute University of Bergen, Norway source URL: https://themis.igpp.ucla.edu/nuggets/nuggets_2019/Haaland/Haaland_19.html From article description: Figure 1. Two dimensional view of the Earth's magnetosphere and its boundaries. The solar wind comes in from the left, is shocked at the bow shock, and slows down as it encounter the Earth. A region of compressed, slowed down and diverted solar wind plasma - the magnetosheath (gray shaded area) is formed between the shock front and the magnetopause (orange boundary). Behind the magnetopause, a magnetic cavity - the magnetosphere is formed.

ALT The Earth's magnetopause is a key boundary governing solar wind-magnetosphere coupling. The Solar wind Magnetosphere Ionosphere Link Explorer (SMILE) mission will provide global soft X-ray imaging of the magnetosphere through solar wind charge exchange (SWCX) emission, offering a new opportunity for remote sensing of magnetopause dynamics. However, the limited field of view (FOV) and variable observation geometry of the Soft X-ray Imager (SXI) pose challenges for reliable magnetopause detection. In this study, we develop MP-DualNet, an end-to-end dual-branch deep learning framework for automated magnetopause detection from simulated SXI observations. The framework jointly performs coarse localization to determine magnetopause visibility and relative position within the FOV, and fine-scale boundary localization through pixel-level segmentation. The model is trained and evaluated using line-of-sight magnetopause envelope maps derived from global hybrid simulations under different solar w































