Cluster Status Report - May 2006
The Cluster constellation is a regular 10 000 km large-scale tetrahedron at the northern cusp. This summer, this 10 000 km tetrahedron will be moved to the centre of the magnetotail.
Operations and archiving
JSOC and ESOC operations are continuing nominally. The data return from mid November 2005 to mid March 2006 was on average 99.5 %. The Perth station is now used nominally since 1 January 2006, together with the Maspalomas station. The CAA was opened as planned on 1 February 2006. A total of 136 users were registered at the end of February and more than 5 Gbytes of high resolution data were downloaded. The CAA deliver also all raw data to the Cluster PIs and CoIs and a total of 97 Gbytes were downloaded during the last four weeks.
Science Highlights
Fundamental 3-D properties of magnetic turbulence observed in the shocked solar wind were published in February 2006 in Physical Review Letters. These properties are of prime importance to model magnetic turbulence in the shocked solar wind, which plays a key role in the dynamical coupling between the solar wind and the magnetosphere. These results could be obtained by combining the magnetic measurements on all four spacecraft using the k-filtering method. The consequences of magnetic turbulence are also relevant to astrophysical and laboratory plasmas.