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PLASTIC's Thermal Blankets Installed

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Prior to being mounted onto Observatory "A" (the one that will be placed "ahead" of Earth in its orbit around the sun), STEREO technicians at APL install a thermal blanket on the PLASTIC instrument. The PLASTIC (PLAsma and SupraThermal Ion Composition) instrument is slated to study coronal-solar wind and solar wind-heliospheric processes. PLASTIC will provide in situ plasma characteristics of protons, alpha particles and heavy ions. It will supply key diagnostic measurements of mass and charge state composition of heavy ions and will characterize the coronal mass ejection plasma from ambient solar wind plasma. The University of New Hampshire's Antoinette Galvin is the principal investigator for PLASTIC.

Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory