3 February 1998
A. M. Heras
The figure shows the orbit of ISO, for different revolutions, projected on the the X-Y plane of the Geocentric Solar Magnetospheric system (GSM). In this system, the X-axis is defined from the Earth to the Sun, the Y-axis is perpendicular to the Earth's magnetic dipole, so that the X-Z plane contains the dipole axis. The data has been taken from the ORBIT file stored in the ISO archive. The coordinate transformation has been done following the work of Russel (Cosmic Electrodynamics 2, 1971, p. 184). In the figure the X and Y axes are horizontal and vertical, respectively, and their units are Earth radii. For comparison, the average positions of the bow shock (outer thin line) and the magnetopause (inner thin line) are also shown.