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[16.15] High Heliographic Latitude Observations of Electron Heat Flux

J.E. Littleton, A.E. Badeau, Jr., J.A. Milsom, E.E. Scime (Dept. of Physics, West Virginia Univ.)

At high heliographic latitudes, sunlight contaminates the SWOOPS electron detectors on the Ulysses spacecraft by generating large numbers of photoelectrons inside the instrument as the detector aperture sweeps past the direction to the Sun. We have developed an algorithm that attempts to remove this contamination. The electron distribution function is corrected by interpolating across the contaminated pixels using data obtained at adjacent spin angles. The electron heat flux, the third moment of the distribution function, is of particular interest because low latitude observations suggest a correlation between the electron heat flux and plasma instabilities.

We report on our application of this algorithm to data from the high latitude passage of the Sun by Ulysses in 1994-95 to determine if there seems to be any latitude dependence of the electron heat flux.

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