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- The WIND spacecraft was launched on November 1, 1994 by a Delta II rocket from
Cape Canaveral Air Station. For the first two years of the mission WIND will be
in a highly elliptical orbit on the sunward side of the Earth with an apogee of
250 Earth radii and a perigee of at least 5 Earth radii. Multiple double lunar
swing by allow WIND to maximize the amount of time it spends directly upstream
of the earth monitoring the solar wind. Later WIND will be inserted into a halo
orbit at the Earth-Sun L1 point.
The nine instruments onboard allow constant monitoring of the solar wind
plasma, energetic particles, magnetic fields, radio and plasma waves found in
the interplanetary medium as well as cosmic gamma ray bursts. For more
information concerning the different instruments please visit the NASA WIND
homepage. For the current status of the WIND spacecraft see NASA WIND status.
Website: http://space.umd.edu/wind/sms.html
[Summary provided by the University of Maryland.]
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