Analyze, understand, and predict the effects of aerospace environment on
humans, hardware and signals
Turn space sensing measurements into knowledge of the aerospace environment
Determine the effects of the aerospace environment on sensors
In-situ and remote sensing:
Some space environment measurements are made on the ground
Dual-use commercial – government space environment monitors
Predominantly Low Earth Orbit (LEO) with an emphasis on:
Upper atmosphere energy deposition and influence on satellite drag
Mission planning and lifetime
Using orbit perturbations to infer the state of LEO environment
Magnetic fields that link earth and space
Geospace system science: sun to geospace to atmosphere to ground
Dataset quality and release preparation
Examples
This video shows an example of the types of data used for SEDA group system science. The display shows top-down views of both geomagnetic poles for a geomagnetic storm on April 14th of 2006. Measurements from the solar-wind (ACE) (shown on the bottom right) are used to estimate the reconnection rate (energy input from the solar wind) via the Borovsky reconnection function (top) while magnetic perturbation measurements (colored vectors in red, blue and green) from NASA's Space Technology 5 mission show the magnetic perturbations from current flowing along the earth's magnetic field from the magnetosphere into the ionosphere/thermosphere. TIMED SABER (blue squares)provides a measure of the thermosphere's cooling via nitrous oxide (NO) radiative energy flux. The CHAMP and GRACE spacecraft (black triangles) provide measures of the atmospheric density and it's response to heating caused by the energy input. The colored contours are the estimated field aligned current values from the Weimer 2005 empirical model.
