Cluster Prelaunch Mission Operation Report

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Cluster Prelaunch Mission Operation Report

The European Space Agency (ESA)/NASA Cluster mission is an international cooperative effort planned for launch no sooner than late May 1996 from Kourou, French Guiana, into a 4 x 19.6 RE polar orbit by the first Ariane V launch vehicle. The Cluster mission will utilize four identically instrumented spacecraft orbiting in a tetrahedral configuration for 2 years to investigate small scale plasma structures in the Earth s space environment. The four Cluster spacecraft were built by Dornier of Germany with shared investigations provided by European and U.S. scientists. Mission Operations will be conducted by the European Space Operations Center with support by the NASA Deep Space Network. The NASA Central Data Handling Facility, which supports fields and particles investigations in the Global Geospace Science and Collaborative Solar Terrestrial Research programs, will serve as a node in the European Cluster Science Data System to facilitate data sharing and analysis by the investigators at home sites. Cluster is the last prime mission to join the International Solar Terrestrial Physics (ISTP) ensemble of missions described in Enclosure 1, the Mission Operations Plan. The aim of the ISTP program is to determine the physical behavior of the solar-terrestrial system and to understand and predict how the Earth s magnetosphere and atmosphere respond to conditions and changes in the solar wind.