Helios 2: 1-Hour Averaged Magnetic Field Vectors in the Inner Heliosphere

1974 to 1981 data from the Helios mission exploring the inner heliosphere inside Earth's orbit. The dataset contains hour-averaged magnetic field vectors from the joint NASA/Italian Ness-Mariani experiment, including intensity, components, and standard deviations. It was produced by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and the University of Rome.

Use Cases

• Modeling solar wind propagation based on magnetic field vectors.
• Analyzing long-term trends in interplanetary magnetic field intensity.
• Studying spacecraft-centered solar ecliptic coordinate system transformations.
• Investigating instrument performance and data averaging effects on range changes.

Strengths

• Covers a 7-year time range from 1974 to 1981.
• Data originates from a joint NASA/Italian scientific instrument with high sensitivity (down to 0.03 nT).
• Includes derived statistics like standard deviations and counts of fine-scale points per average.

Limitations

• Description metadata is limited; actual data quality requires manual inspection after download.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• The dataset notes a potential data quality issue with on-board averaging during 'average' mode operation.

Provenance

Source

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)

Collection Method

Collected by the dual tri-axial fluxgate magnetometers on the Helios 2 spacecraft.

Time Range

1974 - 1981

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03-13 07:06:35.387608; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Inner heliosphere, from Earth's orbit to 0.3 Astronomical Units (AU)