Identification of interplanetary tangential and rotational discontinuities.

Discontinuities in the interplanetary magnetic field detected by the Mariner 5 magnetometer have been analyzed to distinguish tangential and rotational discontinuities. The method used was based on finding the field component normal to the plane of the discontinuities that vanishes for tangential discontinuities and is nonzero for rotational discontinuities. Slightly less than one half of the 118 discontinuities analyzed could not be classified because neither the normal component nor the changes in field magnitude were statistically significant owing to errors in the field measurements and in finding the normal direction. The 44 rotational discontinuities that were finally identified did not exhibit changes in field magnitude in excess of 20%.-