Cluster II at the Space Sciences Laboratory,
University of California, Berkeley
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Cluster II is a quartet of identical spacecraft, designed for studying
the near-Earth space environment, as part of the
European Space Agency's Solar Terrestrial
Science Programme.
Many non-European investigators, including several from the
Space Sciences Laboratory, have been
involved in the design, construction and calibration of the experiments,
and in the analysis of returned data.
Although the local space environment has been studied for decades, this first-time use of four spacecraft orbiting in a tight formation enables us to measure small-scale variations in plasma and field conditions, and to unambiguously separate temporal changes from spatial changes. In particular, the ability to measure gradients in arbitrary directions and to conduct interferometry with identical instruments spaced a few hundred to a couple of thousand kilometers apart, is providing us with new insigts into the structure of boundary layers and the evolution of short-lived phenomena. In the summer of 2000 Cluster was launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, in pairs on-board two Soyuz rockets. The spacecraft were placed into elliptic polar orbits, with dimensions 3 RE × 20 RE. These trajectories are especially well-suited for examining the cusps and high-latitude boundary layers. SSL involvement on Cluster includes people working with the Electric Field and Waves (EFW) and Cluster Ion Spectrometry (CIS) experiments. |
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Last modified: Wed Mar 6 18:16:38 PST 2002