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MIT Space Plasma Group

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

The group has active instruments on two spacecraft, Voyager 2 , and WIND . These instruments are Faraday cup detectors which detect plasma (hydrogen and helium ions) with energies less than 10 keV.

Voyager 2 is beyond all the Sun's planets and has passed through the Termination Shock into the Heliosheath.

The WIND spacecraft is in an orbit around the L1 point (between Earth and the Sun).

Historic data from the IMP 8 spacecraft cover the period from the launch of the spacecraft in 1973 until its demise in October 2006.

A plot illustrating the changes of the solar wind plasma as it moves away from the Sun 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)