MIT Space Plasma Group Voyager Data Page

Plasma data measured by Voyager 2 up through 28 March 2024 (2024/088)

The outer atmosphere of the Sun expands outward to form the solar wind, with average speeds of 400 km/sec (roughly one million miles per hour). The Plasma Science Experiment on Voyager 2 measures that speed every 192 seconds, and that information is returned to Earth over the Deep Space Net.

VOYAGER 2 CURRENTS (near and beyond the heliopause)

The currents in the lowest L-mode channel of the PLS D cup. The D cup points nearest to the interstellar plasma flow direction. The D1 cup covers the energy range 10-30 eV. At 2018.86 Voyager 2 crossed the heliopause. V2 is making the first measurements of the interstellar plasma. We removed noisy and otherwise contaminated data from this plot.

VOYAGER 2 SOLAR WIND SPEED PLOTS (up thru the heliopause)

- click on figure to see larger version of each plot

These plots show hourly averages of the solar wind speeds measured by Voyager 2 over the last 3800 and 100 days, prior to the heliopause, respectively.

Acquiring the Voyager 1 and 2 Data

Voyager plasma data are available from MIT through the links below (but note that updated versions of some browsers no longer support ftp links) or directly through anonymous ftp to space.mit.edu. (cd pub/plasma/vgr). Please look at the README files in each directory before using these data.

Voyager 1: hourly averages and fine resolution data are available by year for 1977-1980.

Voyager 2: daily averages , hourly averages and fine resolution data are available by year for 1977-heliopause (November, 2018). In addition, currents (L-modes) and (M-modes) are available (2018-present).

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VOYAGER 2 SOLAR WIND DYNAMIC PRESSURE (up thru the heliopause)

- click on figure to see larger version of each plot

These plots show hourly averages of the solar wind dynamic pressure observed by Voyager 2 over the entire mission (100-day averages) and over the last ten years (25-day averages), respectively. These pressures are normalized to 1 AU by multiplying by the square of the spacecraft's distance.

VOYAGER DATA OVERVIEW (up thru the heliopause)

- click on figure to see larger version of each plot

These plots show 50-day averages of the solar wind speed, density, and temperature over the life of the Voyager mission (from 1977 to the heliopause), and 1-day averages over the last three years prior to the heliopause, respectively. The density shown is normalized to Earth by multiplying by the distance to Voyager in AU squared.

NASA JPL Voyager Project Home Page

For more information contact John Richardson at MIT (e-mail: jdr@space.mit.edu).