REE/STP Science Application Home

Welcome to the nontechnical test home page for the REE/STP Science Application Team. Herein we answer two basic questions about our project, as we test snippets of html code.

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Electrical currents in plasmas often whistle, hiss, and unexpectedly go boom.

We are trying to figure out what to listen for.

Why multiplatform?

Our understanding of the space environment has been enhanced greatly by instruments on board single spacecraft. But to understand and predict the evolution of solar and planetary magnetospheres requires more than single-pass snapshots through these highly dynamic structures.

Most physical quantities require measurements at several locations in space. This is especially true in space physics because electrical currents constantly rearrange the plasma throughout the cosmos.

Engineers and scientists at NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center are studying the next generation of Solar System environmental probes as part of the Sun-Earth Connections Theme. These experiments will address broad, critical problems of space physics. Furthermore, the challenge of turning multipoint, independent, high fidelity, space-based observations into useful science on Earth will drive a host of technologies. Technologies that will be of immediate use across the fields of communications, computation, and engineering.

Why high performance on-board computing?

High performance means advanced computing technologies currently used in high-end supercomputers.

In space, the gas is so rare and the atoms so energetic that electrons are knocked off and the gas becomes a plasma of electrons and ions. The Electromagnetic Field amongst the electrons and ions strongly couples the motions of the Field, electrons, and ions in waves. These waves include radio, micro, and light waves, plasma waves, and even various kinds of shock waves. Turbulence is often observed.

To observe these phenomena, the control systems on a formation of spacecraft must:

• Enable the detectors,
  or disable them quickly!
• Sample the fields and particles sufficiently rapidly,
  • Without sufficient resolution crucial precursors or trends can be missed!
• Calibrate the measurements,
  • Individually and as a group,
• Make the measurements useful, e.g. turn voltages into:
  • Synthetic images,
  • Particle momentum and energy spectra, and
  • Wave spatial and frequency spectra.
• Often several data analyses must be compared and acted on!

Finally, the phenomena we are interested in are often restricted to small fractions of space, for example the Earth's bow shock in the solar wind. On-board data analysis makes it possible to tailor the mission to study the phenomena of interest. Without advanced on-board computing, possibly enormous volumes of irrelevant data must be sent to back Earth for further analysis.

Data analysis and real-time situation assessment both require on-board high performance computation.