  Particle distributions in weakly collisional environments such as the
magnetosphere have been observed to show deviations from the Maxwellian
distribution. These can often be reproduced in kinetic simulations, but fluid
models, which are used in global simulations of the magnetosphere, do not
necessarily capture any of this. We apply the maximum entropy fluid closure of
Levermore, which leads to well posed moment equations, to reconstruct particle
distributions from a kinetic simulation in a reconnection region. Our results
show that without information other than the moments, the model can reproduce
the general structure of the distributions but not all of the finer details.
The advantages of the closure over the traditional Grad closure are also
discussed.
