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CDAWeb News

Utilizing the Web Service interface of the Virtual Solar Observatory/VSO, CDAWeb Plus has now been expanded to allow prototype integrated access to community-held solar data in a common framework to the wide range of other Heliophysics data and services of SPDF. Please see the CDAWeb home page for more details.

To expand accessibility to SPDF data to a wider community, the data holdings of CDAWeb are now available through the Open-source Project for a Network Data Access Protocol (http://www.opendap.org/). Data in OPeNDAP are accessible via the OPeNDAP Data Connector (ODC), a Java application that allows search and retrieval of datasets published by OPeNDAP data servers regardless of local storage format.

News Items

[ 8 August 2006 ]

- Shing Fung (672) attended the 36th COSPAR Scientific Assembly (July 17-22) and the Western Pacific Geophysics Meeting (WPGM, July 24-27), both held in Beijing, China. At COSPAR, a paper on "Incorporating particle responses in magnetospheric state-based trapped radiation modeling" was presented at the Panel of Radiation Environment Models (PREM) meeting. At the WPGM, an invited paper on "Modeling the Global Radiation Belt Structure and Dynamics" was presented. In addition, a paper on "A Survey of Solar Type III Storm Activity Over the Solar Cycle" was presented.

- Troy Cline (SECEF, 672) attended an Exceptional Space Science Materials for Exceptional Students (ENWS) VI workshop that was held July 23 - 27, 2006 in the Boston Museum of Science, Boston, MA and presented education technologies "Space Weather Action Center". The workshop included education specialists who help to adapt the best NASA science data products to be more accessible by all learners.

- Carolyn Ng (SECEF, 672) and Janie Nall (Code 603.1) co-hosted a meeting with 20 Native American students and faculty members Friday 7/28. Troy Cline (via telecon) and Carolyn shared lessons learned from the One Earth One Universe workshops (http://www.oneearthoneuniverse.org/). The Native American students talked about their internship experiences at NASA, their desire to use more technologies and science at home, and their approach to cultures and sciences. Also leading the discussion were Nancy Maynard (Code 614.1) and Paul Racette (Code 555).

- John Cooper (672) is lead author on an accepted oral presentation to be given next month at the European Planetary Science Congress in Berlin on "Exploring Our Outer Solar System: The Giant Planet System Observers". The presentation will be given by Joe Pitman, optical engineer at Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center. Joe is leading a far remote sensing facility design for a Giant Planet System Observer concept now aimed at a New Frontiers mission to Jupiter and Saturn. Ed Sittler (612.2) and Steve Sturner (USRA/661) are the other co-authors.

[ 18 July 2006 ]

- Dieter Bilitza (Raytheon, 672) is attending the COSPAR and Western Pacific Geophysics Meeting in Beijing, China and chairing a session on the solar activity variation of ionospheric parameters. He is presenting four talks in different sessions and is a co-author on four others. Primary science results are a new version of the International Reference Ionosphere (IRI) and the modelling of electron density and temperature in the topside ionosphere.

- Elaine Lewis and Troy Cline (672) provided a half day training workshop on July 5 to 30 education technology teachers at the National Educational Computing Conference 2006 in San Diego. The teachers learned about different observation methods in "Tracking a Solar Storm", a learning module of the Student Observation Network. They were learned to use a software package called "Visual Communicator" to develop scripts to report and broadcast their research results.

[ 11 July 2006 ]

- John Cooper (672) presented an invited talk on the particle flux environment in the outer heliospheric boundary regions and local interstellar space at the International Workshop on Trans Neptunian Objects [TNOs], Dynamical and Physical Properties at Catania, Italy during July 3-7. This talk reviewed new Voyager measurements of the particle fluxes near and within the heliosheath, also including updated model of local interstellar fluxes from the energy cascade spectrum found by Voyager in the heliosheath and during quiet times by ACE and Ulysses in the inner heliosphere. A two-layer surface irradiation model was presented as a suggested solution to the color diversity problem of Centaurs and TNOs. Radiation-driven chemistry may also provide a heat source for Enceladus-like resurfacing processes on this objects. A review chapter is in preparation on this and related work with co-authors M. E. Hill (APL/JHU), J. D. Richardson (MIT), and S. J. Sturner (USRA/GSFC) for a new book on the Kuiper Belt. This work will be relevant to the choice of potential flyby targets for the on-going New Horizons mission after the Pluto-Charon flyby in 2015.

[ 20 June 2006 ]

- John Cooper (672) and several co-authors submitted the paper "Outer Heliospheric and Local Interstellar Interactions with Scattered Disk Objects" for publication in an American Institute of Physics book from the 5th Annual International Astrophysics Conference, "The Physics of the Inner Heliosheath: Voyager Observations, Theory, and Future Prospects", held March 3-9 in Hawaii. This paper is the first joint planetary-heliospheric analysis of outer solar system objects passing through the heliosheath region on highly eccentric orbits. A few of these objects have sufficiently large aphelion distances to have come within the last ten thousand years from local interstellar space. The paper also suggests an proton energy cascade model for the transition of full energy distributions from interstellar space to the heliosheath.

[ 6 June 2006 ]

- John Cooper (672) is Lead Guest Editor for a special section on Space Physics, Mars, and Life to be published in the June issue of the journal Astrobiology. He is also co-author on one of these papers concerning rheological properties of mixed gas clathrates in the ice crust of Europa.

[ 16 May 2006 ]

- John Cooper (672) presented the invited talk "Space Weathering of Icy Bodies in the New Outer Solar System and the New Heliosphere" at the prestigious Space and Cosmic Ray Physics Seminar of the University of Maryland on May 8.

- A proposal entitled "Investigation of drift-resonant acceleration of relativistic electrons during geomagnetic storms using coupled global MHD and test-particle simulations", submitted in response to the New Investigator Program (NIP) of the 2005 ROSES was selected for funding. Principal Investigator is Dr. Xi Shao (UMCP/672), with Lun Tan (QSS/672) and Shing Fung (672) as Collaborators.

[ 9 May 2006 ]

- Dieter Bilitza (Code 672/Raytheon) attended the First Swarm International Science Meeting in Nantes, France from May 3 to 5 and presented a poster on the data and orbits services of the Space Physics Data Facility that might be of benefit for the Swarm project. Swarm, a 3 satellite ESA Earth science mission, scheduled for a 2010 launch will measure the Earth magnetic field with in unprecedented detail (fraction of a nanotesla) and will also include CHAMP-heritage accelerometers for measuring the neutral density and drift velocity.

[ 25 April 2006 ]

- The Sun Solar System Active Archive team in the Space Physics Data Facility (code 672) is being recognized through a 2006 NASA Honor Group Achievement Award. The project develops and operates a unique and uniquely-important set of multi-mission data services that anticipate the challenge of achieving a unified cross-disciplinary view of the data of the Heliophysics Great Observatory. These services and data are as widely acknowledged in publications as the citations associated with individual missions whose data are served.

The paper "Improvements of the International Reference Ionosphere model for the topside electron density profile" by D. Bilitza, B. W. Reinisch, S. M. Radicella, S. Pulinets, T. Gulyaeva, and L. Triskova was published in the latest issue of Radio Science.

[ 18 April 2006 ]

- President Bush visited the Parkland Middle School in Rockville (http://www.mcps.k12.md.us/schools/parklandms/) to deliver a speech outlining his new initiatives in math and science education. Sten Odenwald (672/QSS) and Lou Mayo (672/Raytheon) have been volunteering at this school since 2005 and were introduced to President Bush as they worked with Parkland's science students. The President later thanked the two scientists in his speech for representing NASA and for inspiring the students.

[ 4 April 2006 ]

- John Cooper (672) gave a talk on the Europa surface radiation environment at the Europa Lander Assessment symposium of the Astrobiology Science Conference 2006 in Washington D.C. during March 26-30. Correlative topographic and high-resolution imaging measurements could allow searches for astrobiologic materials from orbit and for lander sites of high astrobiological potential. He also hosted a related technical briefing on March 31 at GSFC by J. Pitman of Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center on the Multiple Instrument Distributed Aperture Sensor (MIDAS) for high-resolution imaging with "Astrobiology from Orbiter" applications.

- Dieter Bilitza (Code 672/Raytheon) is attending the European Geophysical Meeting in Vienna, Austria, giving two invited talks: (1) solar cycle variations of ionospheric electron temperatures and (2) the use of International Reference Ionosphere (IRI) for geodetic methods. He is also presenting a poster on the Virtual ITM Observatory (VITMO) a joint project of 672 and APL.

[29 March 2006 ]

- On March 29, the Sun-Earth Connection Education Forum (SECEF, code 672) celebrated Sun-Earth Day by creating a streaming webcast of the total solar eclipse as viewed from Side, Turkey. A team of scientists, technicians and educators from the San Francisco Exploratorium, the University of California Berkeley, and Code 672 personnel provided broadcast quality coverage of the eclipse events.

The resulting program appeared whole or in part on NASA TV, CNN, and a large number of other news outlets as well as on the web. The NASA computers linking to the eclipse information pages received a record 8 million hits for the day. Hundreds of emails indicated that programs were carried out in museums and schools throughout the world using the broadcast.

For a replay of the event go to: http://www.exploratorium.edu/eclipse/2006/index.html

- Dr. Vladimir Truhlik from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague is visiting SPDF during the month of March to work with Dr. Dieter Bilitza (Code 672/Raytheon) on a better representation of solar cycle variations of ionospheric parameters in the International Reference Ionosphere (IRI).

- The TOPLA proposal of Dr. Dieter Bilitza (Code 672/Raytheon) was selected for funding as a LWS TR&T tools grant. The goal of the 3-year project is the development of a new topside and plasmasphere model for the International Reference Ionosphere (IRI) based on IMAGE/RPA, DE, ISEE, ISIS, and Alouette data.

[22 March 2006 ]

- Jim Thieman (690.1), Troy Cline and Carolyn Ng (672) will be participating in a Sun-Earth Day/Total Solar Eclipse webcast and several podcasts from Side, Turkey. NASA is partnering with the University of California (UC) at Berkeley and the Exploratorium. The event is centered around a total solar eclipse that is visible in South America, Africa, and Asia on March 29. It will be webcast, podcast and broadcast (live through NASA TV) to schools and museums and the world as part of the Sun-Earth Day program. During the live webcast program, we will make phone calls to three scientists now in Ghana and Libya: Kennedy Reed of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory/National Black Physics Society, Fred Espenak (Mr. Eclipse) of GSFC (693), and Joe Davila (612.1) and team. See Sun-Earth Day 2006 Events.

[21 March 2006 ]

- Jim Gass (code 672 / Raytheon) led the technical team for a Q&A session between astronaut Bill McArthur on the International Space Station (ISS) and 10 students at the Bowie (MD) High School on March 17. The scheduled event used a direct amateur radio voice link from the school to the station as the ISS passed overhead. The session was highly successful, with 20 prepared questions asked by the students and answered by Expedition 12 commander McArthur. The event was witnessed by students, teachers, parents, and members of the local media. Amateur radio organizations from ISS partner countries have set up this program, called ARISS, to develop and operate an on-board amateur radio station on the ISS.

[15 March 2006 ]

- John Cooper (672) attended the IGPP 5th Annual International Astrophysics Conference, Physics of the Inner Heliosheath in Hawaii March 3-9, 2006, and gave an invited talk entitled "Heliosheath Space Environment Interactions with Icy Bodies in the Outermost Solar System". He also participated in a science team meeting for the tentatively-confirmed Interstellar Background Explorer (IBEX) mission, for which 672 may play a key role in supporting public access and archive ingest for IBEX data products.

- Dieter Bilitza (672) was invited to participate in the NATO/URSI Specialists Meeting on Characterizing the Ionosphere at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, June 12-16. He will report on the International Reference Ionosphere as the Climatological Standard for the Ionosphere.

[28 February 2006 ]

- A paper "Long-term variations of the electron slot region and global radiation belt structure" by Fung, Shao and Tan (code 672) published in the February 22nd Geophysical Research Letters was featured in a Goddard press release (see https://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/topstory/2006/safe_zone_shift.html) . The paper demonstrated that the nominal position of the quiet-time radiation belt slot tends to shift to a higher L value (~3) during a solar maximum compared to its canonical L value of ~2.5, more typical of a solar minimum. These changes are believed driven by solar-cycle changes in ionospheric densities, which may cause the optimal wave-particle interaction region during higher solar activity periods to move to higher altitudes and higher latitudes and thus higher to L values.

- At the request of the PI at UC Berkeley, the Space Physics Data Facility (code 672) has added a predicted set of orbits for NASA's THEMIS mission to its SSCWeb orbit data services and associated 3-D Java viewer (see SPDF). THEMIS consists of 5 identical spacecraft making long-baseline (2-25 Re) correlative observations. SSCWeb's multi-mission database supports graphics and listings in multiple coordinate systems and a framework of geophysical regions, plus mappings of spacecraft locations along lines of the Earth's magnetic field and the identification of various kinds of conjunctions. Publicly accessible THEMIS orbit information in SSCWeb will facilitate science planning and gives the international science community an early view of THEMIS in the context of other SSCWeb-supported missions.

- Lou Mayo (code 672 / Raytheon) presented Sun-Earth Day activities at the National Afterschool Association annual conference in Louisville, Kentucky February 23-25, 2006.

- Dieter Bilitza, Carolyn Ng and Barbara Thompson (code 612) attended the MUCERPI Program Retreat in the Greenbelt Marriott on February 22-23. MUCERPI is The Minority University and College Education And Research Partnership Initiative in Space Science (MUCERPI) that funded 15 teams of scientists and educators at various institutes. Because of the 2003 grant, various Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU's), Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSI's), Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCU's), and other minority educational institutions (OMU's) build up their capabilities in space science research, courses and degree programs, and precollege education public outreach.

- The Sun-Earth Connection Education Forum (code 672), in partnership with Langley's NASA Connect, received a First Place Award for Government Programming-Children/Young Adults: "Ancient Observatories-Timeless Knowledge"

[14 February 2006 ]

- Nand Lal and John Cooper (672) participated in a Symposium held February 10-11 to celebrate the 70th birthday of Professor Edward C. Stone, the former director of JPL, the current Project Scientist for Voyager 1 and 2, and the ACE mission Principal Investigator. The most exciting science result reported at the symposium was that Voyager 2 is now detecting upstream low energy increases from the solar wind termination shock, may reach this shock by 2008, and may become the first of the two Voyager spacecraft to subsequently cross the heliopause boundary separating solar wind plasma from local interstellar plasma.

[8 February 2006 ]

- Dr. Dieter Bilitza (code 672) was elected as the URSI representative at the ICSU Panel on World Data Centers for the time period 2006 to 2008. URSI is the International Union of Radio Science and ICSU is the International Committee of Scientific Unions.

[10 January 2006 ]

- John Cooper (672) was lead guest editor for a special issue recently appearing in Icarus (Vol. 178(2), 2005) on Jovian Magnetospheric Environment Science. This collection included ten papers on Galileo Orbiter, Cassini, and Chandra data or new techniques for observation of the Jovian system including the planetary magnetic field, upper atmospheric aurora, energetic particles, and magnetospheric interactions with the Galilean moons. This collection was solicited from participants at the Fall 2003 AGU session of the same name.

- The paper titled "Long-Term Variations of the Electron Slot Region and Global Radiation Belt Structure" by Shing Fung (672), Xi Shao (NAS/NRC, 672), and Lun Tan (QSS/672) was accepted for publication in the Geophysical Research Letters on January 5, 2006.

- R. Kessel (code 672) has joined the steering committee of the Geospace Environment Modeling (GEM) program, a NSF initiative to coordinate and focus research on the near-earth portion of geospace from the lower ionosphere to where the earth system interacts with the solar wind. She attended the mini-workshop at the Fall AGU meeting (Dec. 3, 2005) and has taken part in the Global Interactions and Magnetosphere-Ionosphere Coupling campaigns.

[4 January 2006 ]

- D. Bilitza (Raytheon/Code 672) attended the THEMIS Science Working Team meeting at the Space Science Laboratory in Berkeley on December 17 representing the Sun-Earth Connection Active Archive (SECAA) to discuss science data services relevant to the THEMIS mission. THEMIS will use SECAA's Common Data Format (CDF) for its data products, and plans to make use of SECAA's CDAWeb service for the distribution of data and SSCWeb service for campaign and conjunction planning.