Speaker
Description
An overwhelming number of impactful space weather effects, such as equatorial plasma bubbles and polar cap ionization patches, take place in or are driven by the strongly coupled ionosphere-thermosphere (IT) system. Society’s exponentially increasing dependence on the LEO environment for defense and commercial needs requires a comprehensive examination of this multi-scale, coupled system. Such an approach is exemplified by the ITM Great Observatory (ITM-GO) framework, which has NASA’s strategic missions the Geospace Dynamics Constellation (GDC) and the Dynamic Neutral Atmosphere-Ionosphere Coupling (DYNAMIC) as its cornerstone. GDC would track multiscale measurements of energy input from the magnetosphere to the ionosphere-thermosphere, its effects in the IT region, and internal processes throughout the IT system, while DYNAMIC will examine forcing of the IT system from below. These missions together would provide a comprehensive, multipoint picture of IT variability and its drivers, and will establish the understanding of fundamental space weather processes and the operational pipeline that we need for our increasing reliance on space. Although there is a strongly demonstrated scientific and societal need for the science understanding that would flow from these missions, their development has been challenged by severe fiscal constraints. Given the even more severe constraints on the horizon, we need to explore resilient, low-cost pathways to achieve the critical science targets of the GDC and DYNAMIC missions. Any such pathways must include distributed measurements of the critical drivers and state parameters of the ionosphere and thermosphere, but may find benefit in leveraging new developments in the commercial space sector, as well as advances in modeling, machine learning, and distributed low cost ground-based observations. In this talk, we identify potential paths forward for such a holistic ITM system observatory, including thoughts on how to leverage new commercial capabilities to enhance our ability to pursue high-priority Decadal Science targets.
