HR: 1340h
AN: SH14A-1702    [Abstracts]
TI: Voyager 2 in the Termination Foreshock: Application of Mission Independent Software to Energetic Particle Observations
AU: * Brown, L E
EM: Lawrence.Brown@jhuapl.edu
AF: Applied Physics Laboratory, Johns Hopkins University, 11100 Johns Hopkins Road, Laurel, MD 20723, United States
AU: Hill, M E
EM: Matthew.Hill@jhuapl.edu
AF: Applied Physics Laboratory, Johns Hopkins University, 11100 Johns Hopkins Road, Laurel, MD 20723, United States
AU: Decker, R B
EM: Robert.Decker@jhuapl.edu
AF: Applied Physics Laboratory, Johns Hopkins University, 11100 Johns Hopkins Road, Laurel, MD 20723, United States
AU: Krimigis, S M
EM: Tom.Krimigis@jhuapl.edu
AF: Applied Physics Laboratory, Johns Hopkins University, 11100 Johns Hopkins Road, Laurel, MD 20723, United States
AU: Krimigis, S M
EM: Tom.Krimigis@jhuapl.edu
AF: Academy of Athens, 28 Panepistimiou Avenue, Athens, GRC 106 79,
AU: Vandegriff, J D
EM: Jon.Vandegriff@jhuapl.edu
AF: Applied Physics Laboratory, Johns Hopkins University, 11100 Johns Hopkins Road, Laurel, MD 20723, United States
AB: The Low Energy Charged Particle (LECP) instruments on the Voyager 1 and 2 (V1 and V2) spacecraft have been returning unique scientific measurements since launching in 1977, most notably observations from the historic tour of the giant planets. As these spacecraft continue on their exit trajectories from the Solar system they have become an interstellar mission and have begun to probe the boundary between the heliosphere and the interstellar cloud. In December 2004, V1 crossed the termination shock in the northern heliosphere, entering a region of sub-sonic solar wind flow caused by the pressure of the interstellar material and magnetic field flowing at 26 km/s with respect to the Sun. Now V2 is in the termination foreshock and appears to be very near the termination shock in the South. As the mission changed from one focused on discrete encounters to an open ended search for heliospheric boundaries and transitory disturbances, the positions and timing of which are not known, the data processing needs have changed. Open data policies and the push to draw data under the umbrella of emerging Virtual Observatories have added a data sharing component that was not a part of the original mission plans. We will present our work in utilizing new, reusable software analysis tools to access legacy data in a way that leverages pre-existing data analysis techniques. We will take an existing Applied Physics Laboratory application, Mission Independent Data Layer (MIDL) -- developed originally under a NASA Applied Information Research Program (AISRP) and subsequently used with data from Geotail, Cassini, IMP-8, ACE, and New Horizons -- and apply it to Voyager data. The MIDL codebase will also be used to generate standard data products such as daily summary plots and associated tabulated data that increase our ability to monitor the heliospheric environment on a regular basis. These data products will be publicly available and updated automatically. We will illustrate the usefulness of these techniques of data processing and analysis by investigating some of the recent results from Voyager 2 as it approaches (or crosses) the termination shock.
DE: 2114 Energetic particles (7514)
DE: 2124 Heliopause and solar wind termination
SC: SPA-Solar and Heliospheric Physics [SH]
MN: 2007 Fall Meeting