WIND

The WIND spacecraft was launched on November 1, 1994 to study sources, acceleration mechanisms and propagation processes of energetic particles and the solar wind. It is the first of two NASA spacecraft in the Global Geospace Science (GGS) initiative (the second spacecraft being POLAR). WIND is also part of the International Solar Terrestrial Physics Project (ISTP).
It was specially designed to make coordinated observations with the other ISTP spacecraft (Geotail, Interball, Equator-S, Cluster...etc.). The mission has been extended more than 25 years, so WIND was later inserted into a halo orbit about L1 in 2020. The main science objectives of the WIND mission are:

• provide complete plasma, energetic particle, and magnetic field input for magnetospheric and ionospheric studies;
• determine the magnetospheric output to interplanetary space in the up-stream region;
• investigate basic plasma processes occurring in the near-Earth solar wind;
• provide baseline ecliptic plane observations to be used in heliospheric latitudes from ULYSSES.

Access to mission data

Access to mission documents