Skip to main content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Skip to content

Try the next-generation Data Catalog at catalog-beta.data.gov and help shape it with your feedback.

Voyager 2 Hourly Magnetic Field Data from 1977-1989

Metadata Updated: March 13, 2026

This data set contains hour averages of the interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) measurements obtained by the triaxial fluxgate magnetometer (MAG) experiment on Voyager 2. Identical instruments on Voyager 1 and 2 were designed to measure the IMF between Earth and Saturn (10 AU) during the primary Voyager mission. The design and performance yielded absolute accuracies to better than 0.1 nT. In general, each component of the IMF hourly average has an uncertainty of up to (+/- 0.05 nT) in the region beyond 10 AU. More accurate measurements can be obtained by special processing of the data, but it was not feasible to do this for the entire data set included here. The magnetic field magnitude in nT is provided along with angles of the field vector in the spacecraft-centered Heliographic (HG) coordinate system, also known as RTN. The X-HG axis is directed from the Sun to the spacecraft, Y-HG is the cross product of the solar rotation axis and X-HG, and Z-HG completes the orthogonal axis system. The accompanying format description file defines the transformation of the HG angles to vector components. Cartesian coordinates are given for the spacecraft in the sun-centered Inertial Heliographic (IHG) system, where the Z-IHG axis is parallel to the solar rotation axis, X-IHG points towards the ascending node direction of the solar equator's intersection with the Ecliptic, and Y-IHG is parallel to the solar equator and completes the orthogonal system. The MAG instruments are described by K. W. Behannon et al., Space Science Reviews, 21, 235, 1977. The data and coordinates are described by L. F. Burlaga, Space Science Reviews, 39, 255, 1984. These data are from 1977-1989 and include spacecraft position data whereas the 1990-2004 data do not. The seperation into two data products resulted from the fact that mean fields were falling towards the instrumentation digitization resolution. The Voyager/MAG team temporarily stopped production while they addressed the issue. Subsequent production in 1990 resulted in a similar data set, but without the spacecraft position. This data set is also related to the 1-hour merged Voyager mag and plasma data set. These associations are listed below using the SPASE AssociationID notation.

Access & Use Information

Public: This dataset is intended for public access and use. License: See this page for license information.

Downloads & Resources

No file downloads have been provided. The publisher may provide downloads in the future or they may be available from their other links.

Dates

Metadata Created Date March 13, 2026
Metadata Updated Date March 13, 2026

Metadata Source

Harvested from NASA Data.json

Additional Metadata

Resource Type Dataset
Metadata Created Date March 13, 2026
Metadata Updated Date March 13, 2026
Publisher NASA Space Physics Data Facility (SPDF) Data Services
Maintainer
Identifier /SDE/SPASE_JSON/|5fa6e34a9e492a7978fcaa3863a4b9e0
Data Last Modified 2026-03-09
Category Heliophysics
Public Access Level public
Bureau Code 026:00
Metadata Context https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.jsonld
Schema Version https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema
Catalog Describedby https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.json
Harvest Object Id 9ff289af-199c-459b-b6a8-d5ee2c62d776
Harvest Source Id 58f92550-7a01-4f00-b1b2-8dc953bd598f
Harvest Source Title NASA Data.json
License https://www.usa.gov/government-works
Program Code 026:000
Source Datajson Identifier True
Source Hash 9a8bdbe12af6e089cd646b659e8c89a746c660c9510d5a4c1f76fda3e2550f33
Source Schema Version 1.1

Didn't find what you're looking for? Suggest a dataset here.