New Horizons Solar Wind Around Pluto Solar Wind (SWAP) Measurements from 5 to 23 AU

This year the Solar Wind Around Pluto (SWAP) instrument on the New Horizons (NH) spacecraft collected 79 days of solar wind measurements during hibernation, about 30 days of data during annual checkout operations, and has begun recording another 168 days of data in hibernation which will be played back next year. The currently available NH-SWAP solar wind observations now span from about 5.1 to 23.4 AU. We examine how the peak solar wind speed in the New Horizons measurements vary with distance, report on progress toward automating the fitting of the SWAP solar wind count rate distributions, and take an initial look at the solar wind temperature-speed relationship beyond 11 AU. Since most of the SWAP solar wind observations were collected while spinning, and ions from the entire field-of-view (10 by 276 degrees) are focused onto one pair of coincidence Channel Electron Multiplier, we need to evaluate the effect of spinning on the measured rates. By comparing the 3-axis stabilized, to the rolling and spinning measurements, we strive to assess spin variations in the observed SWAP count rates and develop techniques to account for them. To test our analysis, we fit simulated count rate distributions to quantify how well our technique recovers the input solar wind conditions.