Ion Composition and Density Measurements

Description

This data set, provided by the principal investigator, contains ion composition and density measurements. The data set is on BCD magnetic tape written on an IBM 360 computer. There are 34 files per run and a maximum of two runs per tape. The tapes are time ordered and they contain data obtained from December 1965 to March 1968, with several time intervals in which no measurements were taken.

Included on the tape are the following parameters: the date and universal time of the measurements, the ground station that received the data and the pass number, the mass numbers of the ion species being measured, their concentrations expressed in units of number per cc, and the location of the measurements (the latitude and longitude, both geographic and magnetic, the altitude in kilometers, and the McIlwain L value in earth radii). The spacecraft was designed to have its spin axis normal to the orbital plane. However departures (up to 50 degrees) from the desired spin-axis orientation occurred, and these introduced large errors in the heavy-ion measurements. Because the effect on the light-ion data was far less severe, these data can be used to study the ambient ionosphere. The species concentrations are displayed graphically in data set SPIO-00066. An index to the data is given in data set SPIO-00193.