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MIT Space Plasma Group

The MIT Space Plasma Group was originally founded by Professor Herbert Bridge and Professor Bruno Rossi. The group's current staff consists of John Belcher , Alan Lazarus , John Richardson , Justin Kasper , Pamela Milligan , and Leslie Finck . Recent former members of the group include Chi Wang , Slobodan Jurac , and Justin Ashmall . We honor the memory of our colleague Karolen Paularena (1957-2001).

The group has active instruments on three spacecraft, IMP 8 , Voyager 2 , and WIND. In each case these instruments are Faraday cup detectors which detect plasma with energies less than 10 keV.

IMP 8, Voyager 2, and WIND all spend most of their time in the solar wind and detect solar wind plasma. This enables us to study how the solar wind changes as it moves away from the Sun. A plot illustrating these changes is shown below.

Solar Wind Observations by Voyager 2
and IMP 8 (at 1 AU)

Figure Caption: This plot shows solar wind plasma from IMP 8 in Earth orbit (black line), while Voyager 2 moves from the Sun out to 72 AU (red line). The data shown are 50-day running averages. The Voyager 2 data are time-shifted to 1 AU using a 50-day running average of the solar wind speed measured by Voyager. Densities are normalized to 1 AU by multiplying by Voyager's distance squared.

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Solar Wind Observations by Voyager 2 and IMP 8 (at 1 AU)

Solar Wind Observations by Voyager 2
and IMP 8 (at 1 AU)