Full Resolution ISEE 3 IMF Data Available via ftp and FTPBrowser

By Natalia Papitashvili, H. Kent Hills, Joe King

Interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) data obtained by the International Sun Earth Explorer (ISEE) 3 spacecraft during the period December 11, 1982, through September 17, 1985, are now available at 6 vectors/second resolution from NSSDC. This interval includes most of the 1982-3 period when ISEE 3 was making the first ever observations of the magnetotail in the 100-200 Earth radii range and extends through the 1985 encounter with Comet Giacobini Zinner, the first-ever comet encounter by a man-made object. The data consist of Cartesian components in spacecraft-centered solar ecliptic coordinates. The data records do not include spacecraft position information, which is otherwise available from NSSDC.

The data in gzipped ASCII format and detailed documentation are available at ftp://nssdcftp.gsfc.nasa.gov/spacecraft_data/isee/isee3/magnetic_fields/0.16sec_ascii_gz/ .

In addition, there is an FTPBrowser (formerly called FTPHelper) interface providing graphical browsing and subset-and-retrieve capabilities at http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/ftphelper/isee3.html . This interface also provides a link to lower resolution ISEE 3 position information and a new utility for converting between month-and-day and day-of-year for leap years or non-leap years.

The software for handling the unzipping was written with much generality, such that building future FTPBrowser interfaces should be as straightforward for gzipped ASCII data sets as it has become for non-zipped ASCII data sets.

The data were provided to NSSDC by the Principal Investigator, Dr. Edward Smith, and his colleague, Joyce Wolf, both at the Jet Propulsion Lab.