The solar wind is a magnetized plasma and as such exhibits collective plasma behavior associated with its characteristic spatial and temporal scales. The characteristic length scales include the size of the heliosphere, the collisional mean free paths of all species, their inertial lengths, their gyration radii, and their Debye lengths. The characteristic timescales include the expansion time, the collision times, and the periods associated with gyration, waves, and oscillations. We review the past and present research into the multi-scale nature of the solar wind based on in-situ spacecraft measurements and plasma theory. We emphasize that couplings of processes across scales are important for the global dynamics and thermodynamics of the solar wind. We describe methods to measure in-situ properties of particles and fields. We then discuss the role of expansion effects, non-equilibrium distribution functions, collisions, waves, turbulence, and kinetic microinstabilities for the multi-scale plasma evolution.

TheWindspacecraft, launched on November 1, 1994, is a critical element in NASA’s Heliophysics System Observatory (HSO)—a fleet of spacecraft created to understand the dynamics of the Sun‐Earth system. The combination of its longevity (>25 years in service), its diverse complement of instrumentation, and high resolution and accurate measurements has led to it becoming the “standard candle” of solar wind measurements.Windhas over 55 selectable public data products with over ∼1,100 total data variables (including OMNI data products) on SPDF/CDAWeb alone. These data have led to paradigm shifting results in studies of statistical solar wind trends, magnetic reconnection, large‐scale solar wind structures, kinetic physics, electromagnetic turbulence, the Van Allen radiation belts, coronal mass ejection topology, interplanetary and interstellar dust, the lunar wake, solar radio bursts, solar energetic particles, and extreme astrophysical phenomena such as gamma‐ray bursts. This review introduces the mission and instrument suites then discusses examples of the contributions byWindto these scientific topics that emphasize its importance to both the fields of heliophysics and astrophysics.

We use magnetic field and ion moment data from the MFI and SWE instruments on board the Wind spacecraft to study the nature of solar wind turbulence at ion-kinetic scales. We analyze the spectral properties of magnetic field fluctuations between 0.1 and 5.4 Hz during 2012 using an automated routine, computing high-resolution 92 s power and magnetic helicity spectra. To ensure the spectral features are physical, we make the first in-flight measurement of the MFI “noise-floor” using tail-lobe crossings of the Earth’s magnetosphere during early 2004. We utilize Taylor’s hypothesis to Doppler-shift into the spacecraft frequency frame, finding that the spectral break observed at these frequencies is best associated with the proton cyclotron resonance scale, 1/k _c , rather than the proton inertial length, d _i , or proton gyroscale, ρ _i . This agreement is strongest when we consider periods where , and is consistent with a spectral break at d _i for and at ρ _i for . We also find that the coherent magnetic helicity signature observed at these frequencies is bounded at low frequencies by 1/k _c , and its absolute value reaches a maximum at ρ _i . These results hold in both slow and fast wind streams, but with a better correlation in the more Alfvénic fast wind where the helicity signature is strongest. We conclude that these findings are consistent with proton cyclotron resonance as an important mechanism for dissipation of turbulent energy in the solar wind, occurring at least half the time in our selected interval. However, we do not rule out additional mechanisms.

We investigate the scattering of strahl electrons by microinstabilities as a mechanism for creating the electron halo in the solar wind. We develop a mathematical framework for the description of electron-driven microinstabilities and discuss the associated physical mechanisms. We find that an instability of the oblique fast-magnetosonic/whistler (FM/W) mode is the best candidate for a microinstability that scatters strahl electrons into the halo. We derive approximate analytic expressions for the FM/W instability threshold in two different β _c regimes, where β _c is the ratio of the core electrons’ thermal pressure to the magnetic pressure, and confirm the accuracy of these thresholds through comparison with numerical solutions to the hot-plasma dispersion relation. We find that the strahl-driven oblique FM/W instability creates copious FM/W waves under low-β _c conditions when , where U _0s is the strahl speed and w _c is the thermal speed of the core electrons. These waves have a frequency of about half the local electron gyrofrequency. We also derive an analytic expression for the oblique FM/W instability for β _c ∼ 1. The comparison of our theoretical results with data from the Wind spacecraft confirms the relevance of the oblique FM/W instability for the solar wind. The whistler heat-flux, ion-acoustic heat-flux, kinetic-Alfvén-wave heat-flux, and electrostatic electron-beam instabilities cannot fulfill the requirements for self-induced scattering of strahl electrons into the halo. We make predictions for the electron strahl close to the Sun, which will be tested by measurements from Parker Solar Probe and Solar Orbiter.

We investigate the conditions under which parallel-propagating Alfvén/ion-cyclotron (A/IC) waves and fast-magnetosonic/whistler (FM/W) waves are driven unstable by the differential flow and temperature anisotropy of alpha particles in the solar wind. We focus on the limit in which w ∥α 0.25v A, where w ∥α is the parallel alpha-particle thermal speed and v A is the Alfvén speed. We derive analytic expressions for the instability thresholds of these waves, which show, e.g., how the minimum unstable alpha-particle beam speed depends upon w ∥α/v A, the degree of alpha-particle temperature anisotropy, and the alpha-to-proton temperature ratio. We validate our analytical results using numerical solutions to the full hot-plasma dispersion relation. Consistent with previous work, we find that temperature anisotropy allows A/IC waves and FM/W waves to become unstable at significantly lower values of the alpha-particle beam speed U α than in the isotropic-temperature case. Likewise, differential flow lowers the minimum temperature anisotropy needed to excite A/IC or FM/W waves relative to the case in which U α = 0. We discuss the relevance of our results to alpha particles in the solar wind near 1 AU.