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We expose and quantify the inaccuracies of plasma bulk parameters derived from the calculation of velocity moments of noisyin-situplasma observations. First, we simulate typical solar wind proton plasma observations, obtained by a typical top-hat electrostatic analyzer instrument. We add background noise to the simulated observations and analyze them by applying standard methods to derive the plasma density, speed, and temperature. We then compare the analysis results with the parameters we use to simulate the observations in the first place, in order to quantify the inaccuracies in the calculated plasma parameters as functions of the noise level in the observations. We find that even noise levels that are smaller than 1% of the signal peak, lead to significant inaccuracies in some plasma parameters. The plasma temperature suffers the biggest inaccuracies and the plasma speed the smallest. Our results highlight the importance of removing noise from observations when calculating the moments of the constructed plasma distributions. We finally, evaluate one simple method to remove uniform background noise automatically from measurements, which is useful for future on-board analyses.

This paper presents the misestimation of temperature when observations from a kappa distributed plasma are analyzed as a Maxwellian. One common method to calculate the space plasma parameters is by fitting the observed distributions using known analytical forms. More often, the distribution function is included in a forward model of the instrument's response, which is used to reproduce the observed energy spectrograms for a given set of plasma parameters. In both cases, the modeled plasma distribution fits the measurements to estimate the plasma parameters. The distribution function is often considered to be Maxwellian even though in many cases the plasma is better described by a kappa distribution. In this work we show that if the plasma is described by a kappa distribution, the derived temperature assuming Maxwell distribution can be significantly off. More specifically, we derive the plasma temperature by fitting a Maxwell distribution to pseudo-data produced by a kappa distribution, and then examine the difference of the derived temperature as a function of the kappa index. We further consider the concept of using a forward model of a typical plasma instrument to fit its observations. We find that the relative error of the derived temperature is highly depended on the kappa index and occasionally on the instrument's field of view and response., 7 Figures and 19 pages The article is currently in press by "Astrophysics and Space Science" journal The articles number is ASTR-D-16-00131R4