Small Bodies Mission Support

The Ulysses spacecraft, a joint endeavor between the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA, was launched from the space shuttle in October 1990. It flew past Jupiter in February 1992 for a gravitational assist in getting to its final orbit, a polar orbit around the Sun. It subsequently flew over the south pole of the Sun in 1994, the north pole in 1995, and undertook a second solar orbit which brought it back to the solar poles in 2000-2001 during a period of maximum solar activity. The out-of-ecliptic orbit of the spacecraft has a period of 6.2 years. The mission has been extended until March 2008, to allow a third fly-over of the solar poles during 2007-8.

Although the primary objective of the mission is to study the properties of the heliosphere as a function of solar latitude, Ulysses also collects data concerning interplanetary dust, and studied the Jovian magnetosphere while flying past that planet.

The Ulysses Project web site is maintained by NASA/JPL.

The SBN, through its Interplanetary Dust Subnode and in cooperation with the Planetary Plasma Interactions Node, is the contact PDS node archiving the Dust Detector System data both in the encounter and cruise phases.

Instrument/Investigation	Measuring	Small Bodies Data available below
Dust Experiment (DDS)	Interplanetary dust	DDS data, 1990-1995
Magnetometer	Large scale features and gradients of the solar magnetic field	none
Solar Wind Observations (SWOOPS)	Bulk flow and internal state conditions of the interplanetary plasma	none
Solar Wind Ion Composition Spectrometer (SWICS)	Characteristics of all major solar wind ions	none
Unified Radio and Plasma Wave Experiment (URAP)	Characterization of radio sources and local wave phenomena	none
Energetic Particle Composition Experiment (EPAC)	Ions in the energy range 300keV - 25MeV per nucleon	none
Heliosphere Instrument for Spectra, Composition and Anisotropy at Low Energies (HI-SCALE)	Elemental abundances and spectra of interplanetary ions and electrons	none
Cosmic Ray and Solar Particle Investigation (COSPIN)	Nucleons in the energy range 0.5-600MeV/nucleon	none
Gamma-Ray Burst Instrument (GRB)	Solar X-ray/cosmic Gamma-ray burst experiment	none
Solar Corona Experiment (SCE)	Plasma parameters of the solar atmosphere	none
Gravitational Wave Experiment (GWE)	Gravitational waves in the low frequency band	none

Instrument/ Investigation Description	Target	Description of Available Data	Data Link
DDS	Interplanetary Dust	Interplanetary dust measurements, 1990-1995	On-line

Target	Target Type	Other Data Sets Targeting this Object
Dust	Interplanetary Dust	Galileo DDS: Results from the Galileo Dust Detector System