Wind (spacecraft)

Wind is a NASA science spacecraft in the Global Geospace Science program, designed to study radio waves and plasma in the solar wind and in the Earth's magnetosphere. It was launched on 1 November 1994 from Cape Canaveral aboard a McDonnell Douglas Delta II 7925-10 rocket and was designed and manufactured by the Martin Marietta Astro Space Division in East Windsor Township, New Jersey. The satellite is a spin-stabilized cylinder about 2.4 metres across and 1.8 metres tall. Its original plan was to orbit the Sun at the L1 Lagrangian point, but it first spent time studying the magnetosphere and the near lunar environment; it has stayed at L1 continuously since May 2004. Its instruments measure plasma, energetic particles, magnetic fields and radio waves, and its data have been used in thousands of scientific publications.