Voyager 2 Hourly Magnetic Field Data from 1990-2004

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 1990-2004 and do not include spacecraft position data whereas the 1977-1989 data do. 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.

Data and Resources

This dataset has no data

Additional Info

Field Value
Maintainer NASA Space Physics Data Facility
Last Updated June 8, 2026, 17:33 (UTC)
Created March 9, 2026, 21:36 (UTC)
accessLevel public
bureauCode {026:00}
catalog_conformsTo https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema
harvest_object_id bb6b6bb4-f49f-480b-af88-3ada9c47d621
harvest_source_id b99e41c6-fe79-4c19-bbc3-9b6c8111bfac
harvest_source_title Science Discovery Engine
identifier /SDE/SPASE_JSON/|6987dfe52d626efd54e6b82eca2677b3
license https://www.usa.gov/government-works
modified 2026-06-03T16:52:47Z
programCode {026:000}
publisher NASA Space Physics Data Facility (SPDF) Data Services
resource-type Dataset
source_datajson_identifier true
source_hash 982af91872123d28534e8f4a63204b562cb04def128612f4b0d3c2da3c8cbe06
source_schema_version 1.1
theme {Heliophysics}