Abstract
The Spektr-R spacecraft was launched on a Zenit-3F rocket into an orbit with a perigee of 10.000 kilometers and apogee of 390.000 km on July 18, 2011. The spacecraft operational lifetime would exceed five years.
The main task of the mission is investigations of distant sources of electromagnetic emissions but, as a supporting measurement, the spacecraft carries a complex of instruments for solar wind monitoring because it will spend there approximate to 8 days out of the 9-day orbit. The main task of the solar wind monitor (BMSW) is to provide fast measurements of the solar wind density, velocity, and temperature with a maximum time resolution of 31 ms.
Such time resolution was obtained using simultaneous measurements of several Faraday cups oriented permanently nearly in the solar wind direction. In this paper, we describe briefly basic principles of the BMSW operation, and show a few examples its observations.
We present frequency spectra of the solar wind turbulence at the kinetic scale and an example of high-frequency waves associated with an IP shock.