The International Solar-Terrestrial Physics (ISTP) program is the primary 1990s activity for the international space plasma physics community. Several spacecraft, provided by the European Space Agency (ESA-Europe), the Space Research Institute of the Academy of Sciences (IKI-Russia), the Institute of Space and Aeronautical Science (ISAS-Japan), and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA-USA), are widely considered as the core spacecraft for this program. However, there are or will be many more spacecraft of various nations flying in the 1990s with the potential to contribute in situ fields, waves, plasma, and energetic particle data to the overall ISTP program.
A new World Wide Web page has recently been created by NSSDC identifying and briefly characterizing 26 ISTP-relevant spacecraft or spacecraft series. This page is an outgrowth of a paper presented by the author at the 31st COSPAR Assembly in July 1996. NSSDC will endeavor to add more relevant spacecraft as they become known to NSSDC and will generally endeavor to maintain a currency of the page's information content. The page is at http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/space/helios/cospar.html.
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Author:Miranda Beall