Cluster (EFW)

The Swedish Institute of Space Physics in Uppsala is responsible for the EFW (Electric Field and Wave) instrument that measures electric fields and waves in space plasma.

The instrument, which is on each of the satellites, examines how the Earth’s outer shield against space, the magnetic field, interacts with the solar wind. The Principal Investigator for IRF:s instrument is Prof. Mats André.

IRF’s four EFW instruments were built in collaboration with other research groups in the USA, Holland, Finland,Norway and other countries. The Alfvén Laboratory at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm also participates.

Other research groups in Europe and the USA have built the other ten instruments, which measure, among other things, what kinds of particles there are out there and what energies the different particles have.

IRF in Kiruna has contributed to CIS (the Cluster Ion Spectrometry Experiment) from the Research Institute in Astrophysics and Planetology in Toulouse, France, and RAPID (Research with Adaptive Particle Imaging Detectors) from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany.