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The IMP 8 spacecraft was launched in 1973 and is still returning important measurements of the particle and field environment of the solar wind. The MIT Faraday cup experiment on IMP 8 measures currents from solar wind ions, and from these measurements we calculate the velocity, density, and temperature of the solar wind. An overview of the data obtained over the entire mission is shown below. Fine resolution, hourly average, and daily average data can be obtained via anonymous ftp or by using the links below.
The IMP 8 data files consist of fine resolution data (approximately 1 minute resolution), hourly average data, and daily average data. These data may also be accessed via anonymous ftp to space.mit.edu (for those who don't wish to see the data before retrieving them!). Please look at the README files in each directory before using these data.
Only interplanetary (solar wind) data are available via WWW. However, IMP 8 traverses Earth's magnetosphere twice during each orbit, providing plasma parameters in the magnetosheath. These data are only available by contacting Dr. Alan J. Lazarus, the Principal Investigator of the MIT experiment.
Reports and statistics of the Magellan altimetry and radiometry experiments, browse versions of all SAR images, full-resolution images of Venus surface properites, and many other Venus-related databases.
Radar data from the Pioneer Venus Orbiter spacecraft, including time-series altimetric and radiometric data submitted to the National Space Sciences Data Center in January 1985, a triplet of images in GIF format showing the centimeter-scale backscatter cross section of Venus from about 50N to 20S latitude, taken from the side-looking mode of the Radar Mapper, and images from the altimetric and radiometric modes, representing re-samplings of the time-series data.
Venus synthetic aperture radar images, topography, radiometry, and surface properties data sets from the Venera 15/16 radar mapper experiments in 1983-4, from the Vernadsky Institute and the Moscow Power Institute.
Plots of 50-day averages of the solar wind speed, density, and temperature over the life of the Voyager mission from 1977 to the present.
The WIND spacecraft was launched on November 1, 1994. It will serve primarily as a solar wind monitor, determining the solar wind conditions being felt at Earth. MIT built the Faraday cups which are used to detect the solar wind protons. The SWE instrument was turned on on November 12, 1994 and is working perfectly.
The Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) is a satellite that observes the fast-moving, high-energy worlds of black holes, neutron stars, X-ray pulsars and bursts of X-rays that light up the sky and then disappear forever.
Maps of the sky showing all sources detected recently by the All-Sky Monitoraboard the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer. An Aitoff projection of the entire sky in galactic coordinates and a Cartesian projection of the Galactic center region are shown. The table gives the value of the flux from the latest measurement, the flux averaged over the previous day, and the flux averaged over the previous week. A light-curve giving the fluxes over the past one to two weeks can be obtained for each source by clicking on the name of the source in the table.
This page contains on-line links to publications relevant to the study of X-ray binaries, isolated neutron stars, young stellar clusters, and spectroscopy in general.
The MIT CXC Science Gallery pages contain links to supernova remnants, high resolution x-ray spectroscopy, ground calibration of the HETG, software packages, analysis pages and more.
What you will find here is contact information and other resources relevant to the Chandra X-ray Observatory Center (CXC) ACIS Operations team members.
With XMM the intention is to primarily utilize the RGS spectrometer for high resolution X-ray spectroscopy on X-ray binaries containing either neutron stars or black holes, on isolated neutron stars and pulsars, supernova remnants, stars and stellar clusters.
The Chandra X-ray Observatory is the U.S. follow-on to the Einstein Observatory. Chandra was formerly known as AXAF, the Advanced X-ray Astrophysics Facility, but renamed by NASA in December, 1998. Originally three instruments and a high-resolution mirror carried in one spacecraft, the project was reworked in 1992 and 1993. The Chandra spacecraft carries a high resolution mirror, two imaging detectors, and two sets of transmission gratings. Important Chandra features are: an order of magnitude improvement in spatial resolution, good sensitivity from 0.1 to 10 keV, and the capability for high spectral resolution observations over most of this range.