By assuming the validity of the Rankine‐Hugoniot conservation relations for interplanetary shocks in an isotropic medium it is demonstrated that improved shock normals can be calculated by employing a least squares technique to combined magnetic field and plasma data from a single spacecraft. The scheme uses only the conservation relations (six in number) that are devoid of pressure and temperature terms. Transformation of these equations into an arbitrary frame of reference reduces the system to three independent ‘overdetermination’ equations. These three equations constitute a 3‐parameter redundancy among the 11 measured parameters of the system: B1, B2, W (= V2 ‐ V1), ρ1, and ρ2, where subscripts 1 and 2 refer to before and after the shock, respectively. By exploiting this redundancy in the cases of simulated shocks, whose basic noiseless characteristics are known exactly, it has been shown for many realistic examples, through the minimization of a least squares loss function, that the normals are calculated with error improvements of factors of about 3 or so over calculations made using the magnetic field alone. As an example of the method a corrected normal and improved shock parameters are then obtained for a real case: the August 29, 1966, shock observed by the Pioneer 7 spacecraft. The scheme should prove useful in examining the shape of a shock surface whenever data for a shock event are available from two or more spacecraft widely separated in solar longitude.
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