Thermal Ion Measurements Data

Description

These experimenter-supplied, thermal ion measurement data are on magnetic tape created from a merge of the plasma composition experiment telemetry data tapes and the definitive attitude ephemeris tapes. A substantial amount of preprocessing was applied to unpack the telemetry format, determine instrument pointing directions, and collate the ion data with measurements of the magnetic field. The data were written on binary tapes on a Univac 1180 computer. Each physical block contains 10 logical records of 302 36-bit words. In summary, each logical record contains header parameters, selected attitude data, 32 sequential measurements from each of the three ion sensor outputs, 32 corresponding measurements of the magnetic field components, and 32 pitch angle calculations. Time resolution is 8 seconds. Because thermal ion measurements are generally obtained when the spacecraft is in the magnetosphere, the tapes will exclude periods when the spacecraft was in the solar wind and periods of special studies in which the instrument concentrated on specific energetic populations.