SWAVES/STEREO

Iver Cairns is a named Co-Investigator on the STEREO Waves (SWAVES) instrument on the NASA's two Solar TErestrial RElations Observatory (STEREO) and Peter Robinson is an official member of the scientific team. The team is led by Jean-Louis Bougeret (Principal Investigator) and Mike Kaiser (Deputy Principal Investigator) and contains people from Australia, France, USA, and elsewhere. STEREO will perform the first stereoscopic studies of solar and interplanetary activity, with interest in the phenomena and underlying physics and the prediction of space weather events. SWAVES will study both remote radio pheonomena and in situ plasma waves. More information can be obtained from the webpages for STEREO itself
(http://stereo.gsfc.nasa.gov/spacecraft.shtml) and
the SWAVES instrument
(http://www-lep.gsfc.nasa.gov/swaves/swaves.html).

Figure. Schematic of the STEREO mission: the two STEREO spacecraft, one in front and one behind Earth in its orbit, triangulate on a coronal mass ejection (CME) leaving the Sun. The SWAVES instrument uses the long wire antennas on each spacecraft to detect radio waves associated with the CME (type II bursts) and solar flares (type III bursts) and plasma waves generated locally to the spacecraft.

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