Wind WAVES: High-Resolution Radio and Plasma Wave Parameters from the Wind Spacecraft

Wind spacecraft data from three instruments—RAD1, RAD2, and TNR—measuring radio and plasma waves in space. RAD1 covers 20 to 1040 kHz, RAD2 covers 1.075 to 13.825 MHz, and the TNR tracks the solar wind plasma frequency from 4 to 256 kHz. The dataset, provided by NASA, is stored in CDF format and was last updated in March 2026.

Use Cases

• Analyzing solar radio burst signatures based on high-frequency RAD2 receiver data.
• Studying solar wind plasma frequency dynamics based on TNR instrument measurements.
• Investigating direction of arrival and polarization of radio waves based on RAD1 and RAD2 multi-channel data.
• Detecting and classifying plasma wave phenomena like auroral kilometric radiation or whistlers based on spectral data.

Strengths

• Data originates from the NASA Wind spacecraft, a long-running space physics mission.
• Instruments provide high spectral resolution with up to 256 channels per sweep.
• Covers a wide combined frequency range from 4 kHz to 13.825 MHz across three receivers.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Description metadata is limited; actual data quality requires manual inspection after download.

Provenance

Source

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)

Collection Method

Collected by the Radio and Plasma Wave Investigation (WAVES) instruments on the Wind spacecraft.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03-13 03:46:25.637126; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Space, primarily in the solar wind and near-Earth environment.