Speaker
Description
Space Weather has traditionally explored the Sun’s immediate influence on the Earth system and its technology, including direct impact to humans. With the future of increased human and robotic missions to Mars, it is important to fill critical gaps and establish robust capabilities for predicting, monitoring, and mitigating space weather effects beyond Earth. The Mars Space Weather Collaboration was created with the goal of developing near real-time products for space weather activity directed towards Mars. The four essential pillars that make up this group include: in situ data currently collected at Mars, space weather and Mars models, space weather prediction capabilities, and robotic/human spaceflight operations. These pillars work together to utilize current resources, identify tools that are needed to monitor space weather at Mars, and develop these tools for use in future operations. One of these tools is the Mars Space Weather Dashboard, which is hosted on the NASA Community Coordinated Modeling Center’s (CCMC) Integrated Space Weather Analysis (ISWA) system. This dashboard includes near real-time particle, field, and solar flare data from NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN mission (MAVEN). Data from the Radiation Assessment Detector (RAD) onboard NASA’s Curiosity Rover will soon be available to provide near real-time measurements of surface radiation at Mars. Additional datasets and models will be continuously added to expand this dashboard as a tool for space weather analysts to assess activity and response at Mars. This dashboard provides a proof-of-concept that is being prototyped by NASA’s Moon to Mars Space Weather Analysis Office (M2M SWAO) for analyzing predictions of space weather events directed towards Mars. CCMC is enabling access to Mars near real-time data and working with model developers to implement new Mars space weather forecasting capabilities. Additionally, NASA’s Space Radiation Analysis Group (SRAG) plays a key role by establishing safety limits on radiation exposure received by astronauts, which provides guidance to the tools being developed by the Mars Space Weather Collaboration. As this Collaboration continues to grow, we will incorporate data and models from projects at various institutions around the world. The ultimate goal of the team is to identify, understand, and fill gaps in space weather research and monitoring at Mars while emphasizing open collaboration to fill in those gaps.
| Do you plan to attend in-person or online? | In-person |
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