Initial results from the New Horizons exploration of 2014 MU, a small Kuiper Belt object.

The Kuiper Belt is a distant region of the outer Solar System. On 1 January 2019, the New Horizons spacecraft flew close to (486958) 2014 MU, a cold classical Kuiper Belt object approximately 30 kilometers in diameter. Such objects have never been substantially heated by the Sun and are therefore well preserved since their formation.

Constraining Solar Wind Heating Processes by Kinetic Properties of Heavy Ions.

We analyze the heavy ion components (A>4  amu) in collisionally young solar wind plasma and show that there is a clear, stable dependence of temperature on mass, probably reflecting the conditions in the solar corona. We consider both linear and power law forms for the dependence and find that a simple linear fit of the form T_{i}/T_{p}=(1.35±.

Invited article: Characterization of background sources in space-based time-of-flight mass spectrometers.

For instruments that use time-of-flight techniques to measure space plasma, there are common sources of background signals that evidence themselves in the data. The background from these sources may increase the complexity of data analysis and reduce the signal-to-noise response of the instrument, thereby diminishing the science value or usefulness of the data. This paper reviews several sources of background commonly found in time-of-flight mass spectrometers and illustrates their effect in actual data using examples from ACE-SWICS and MESSENGER-FIPS.