STEREO-A PLASTIC: Helium Pickup Ion Velocity Distributions in Solar Wind

STEREO-A spacecraft data provides helium pickup ion velocity distributions in the solar wind frame at a 5-minute resolution. The dataset is not efficiency corrected, which affects suprathermal tail measurements, and is released in conjunction with the publication of Bower et al. (2019). Funding was provided by NASA grants NNX16AF79G and 80NSSC17K000 at the University of New Hampshire and DLR-Grant 50 OC 1103 at Universität Kiel.

Use Cases

• Modeling solar wind helium pickup ion core distributions based on velocity vector data.
• Analyzing ion velocity distributions relative to solar wind speed based on 69 velocity bins.
• Studying suprathermal tail effects in uncorrected efficiency data.
• Correlating ion composition data with other STEREO-A instrument measurements.

Strengths

• Data is defined at a high 5-minute time resolution.
• Velocity distributions are provided across 69 specific velocity bins.
• Dataset is released with a specific associated publication (Bower et al., 2019).
• Funding sources and principal investigator contacts are explicitly documented.

Limitations

• Dataset is not efficiency corrected, which likely introduces artifacts in the suprathermal tail region.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count and total data volume are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.

Provenance

Source

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Collection Method

Data collected by the STEREO-A spacecraft PLASTIC instrument.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03-13 11:07:20.161925; freshness should be verified.