Before the Ulysses mission, in situ measurements of the solar wind plasma had
been limited to heliographic latitudes of 216 (Because of an instrument
failure, Voyager 1, now at 
32 N latitude, can measure the magnetic field,
but not the plasma parameters.). Ulysses reached its highest latitude of
80.2 S in September, 1994.
Figure 2 shows the solar wind speed measured by Ulysses as a function of
heliographic latitude from the time of the Jupiter flyby in February, 1992,
through September, 1994. From Jupiter to 
12 S, Ulysses observed rather
slow, highly fluctuating solar wind speeds which are not unusual for
near-ecliptic, solar maximum conditions near 5 AU. The change at 
12 S was
caused by both the increasing solar latitude and changes on the Sun, leading to
the spacecraft passing in and out of the quasi-steady high speed flow from the
southern polar coronal hole, and crossing the low-speed streamer belt and
heliospheric current sheet once per solar rotation [ Bame et al., 1993].
The high-speed streams seen by Ulysses between roughly 15 and 20 S are
probably the same streams seen by Voyager in 1993 (Figure 1). The stream
amplitude of 
350 km/s measured at Ulysses was not only much greater than that
measured at Voyager, but also slightly greater than that measured in the
ecliptic at 1 AU by IMP 8, despite the greater heliocentric distance (>5 AU) of
Ulysses. The decline in stream interactions with increasing heliographic
latitude between 0 and 
20 is evidently greater than the increasing effect
of stream interactions between 1 and 5 AU.
Beyond 
28 S the spacecraft remained above the current sheet [ Smith et
al., 1993], while after 
35 S, it was permanently in the high-speed polar
flow [ Phillips et al., 1994]. Beyond 
40 S, the speed observed by
Ulysses was usually between 700 and 800 km/s, which is 
100 km/s higher than the
highest yearly-average speeds measured at high latitudes by remote sensing using
interplanetary scintillation (IPS) techniques over the 16-year period 1972-1987
[ Rickett and Coles, 1991]. The difference is perhaps not surprising
because direct comparisons of IPS data with in-ecliptic spacecraft data have
previously shown that IPS often underestimates the highest speeds.
Even though the origin of coronal mass ejections (CMEs) which cause transient solar wind flows are highly concentrated near the Sun's magnetic equator (i.e., the heliospheric current sheet) [ Hundhausen, 1993], Ulysses continues to observe CME flow at high latitudes. There are some interesting differences between CMEs near the equator and at high latitudes. First, a wide range of solar-wind speeds (from 200 to 1000 km/s, including the spike seen in Figure 2 near 20 S) is observed in near-equatorial CME flows, whereas all the CMEs observed by Ulysses above 40 S latitude had speeds between 650 and 800 km/s [ Gosling et al., 1994 a]. Second, some of the high-latitude CMEs were preceded by a forward shock and followed by a reverse shock; such shock pairs driven by the rapid expansion of CME material had not been previously identified in the solar wind [ Gosling et al., 1994 b].
Solar-rotation averages of the proton flux, normalized to 1 AU, showed a
decrease from 
4x10
cm
s
equatorward of --10 to a
fairly steady value of 
2.5x10
cm
s
between 40 and
60 S [ Goldstein et al., 1995; McComas et al., 1995]. The
proton temperature observed by Ulysses poleward of 40 S is significantly
lower (1.5x10
K) than that in high-speed streams near the ecliptic
(2.3x10
K) [ McComas et al., 1995].
To latitudes of 45 S, Ulysses observations of the radial component of the magnetic field, which is the component which comes closest to characterizing the field strength in the source region of the solar wind, remained constant with latitude. At the same time, the relative amplitude of Alfvén waves (propagating changes in the direction of the magnetic field) propagating outward from the Sun increased strongly with increasing latitude and showed longer periods or longer wavelengths than the Alfvén waves seen in high-speed streams in the ecliptic [ Smith et al., 1995].