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SPIDER: Supporting Space Weather Studies Through the Solar System      

Nicolas André (Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie, France) and Andrea Opitz (HUN-REN Wigner Research Centre for Physics, Hungary) describe how Europlanet’s SPIDER services are supporting planetary space weather studies and Solar System missions

Read article in the fully formatted PDF of the Europlanet Magazine.

Space weather has become an increasingly important field of research in recent years. While the majority of this scientific activity has focused on space weather effects on Earth, the impact of the solar wind is also critical for studies of other planets, asteroids and comets.

Planetary and solar missions operating across the Solar System are now building up significant archives of space weather data. Thus, new tools for analysing and comparing these space weather datasets are required, both to understand the effects of the solar wind on different planetary bodies and also to support mission teams planning operations and future scenarios for planetary spacecraft.

The infrastructure gives more flexibility and options for an extended community of users to work independently, and is less time-consuming for the code developers. However, there are still contacts and links to the code owners so that researchers can develop collaborations, find out more about the code or extend the model to solve additional scientific questions.

Before 2020, this approach had already proved popular in the United States, but had not yet been implemented in Europe. The Europlanet 2024 RI project, therefore, provided us with a good opportunity to push forward with SPIDER, taking advantage of other European initiatives like the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) and ESCAPE (a cluster of European astronomy & particle physics research infrastructures) that were running and growing at the time.

Supporting Missions

SPIDER enables researchers to take advantage of data from a suite of key missions that are led and operated by ESA at different points in the Solar System. From its vantage point close to the Sun, Solar Orbiter is directly measuring the solar wind upstream of many planets, and this data can be compared with detections at other planetary bodies. BepiColombo, launched in 2018, and Juice, launched in 2023, are on complex trajectories that include multiple flybys of various planets, over several years, enroute to their final targets. Thus, it has been a priority for SPIDER to develop services using Solar Orbiter data (made available in the AMDA tool at CNRS ) and addressing the needs of BepiColombo and of Juice.

The joint ESA-JAXA BepiColombo mission consists of a pair of spacecraft that will orbit around Mercury, giving two viewpoints of the environment dominated by Mercury’s magnetic field. The data that the two spacecraft send back will enable studies on a very small spatial scale of what’s happening both outside and within this magnetic environment. To prepare for the analysis of data once BepiColombo reaches Mercury, SPIDER services were trialled during a double flyby of Venus by BepiColombo and Solar Orbiter, during which datasets gathered by each mission were combined to study small-scale variations in the solar wind. The dual set of observations were particularly valuable because the solar wind conditions experienced by Solar Orbiter were very stable, which meant that BepiColombo could observe the different regions within Venus’s magnetosheath and magnetosphere undisturbed by fluctuations from solar activity.

Two Mercury flybys have also provided opportunities to correlate measurements by NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, Solar Orbiter and BepiColombo. This work was led by Europlanet partner institutes, including IRAP CNRS and the Swedish Institute for Space Physics (IRF), and resulted in proof-of-concept papers. These have been published in high impact journals, like Nature Communications, and we hope this will help spread the word about how researchers can use SPIDER tools and services in their own work.

Preparation is also ongoing for when the Juice mission reaches the Jupiter system. The SPIDER team is fortunate to include some European collaborators on NASA’s Juno mission, which has been in orbit around Jupiter since 2016. These collaborators include Alessandro Mura of INAF, the Principal Investigator of the JIRAM instrument, as well as several researchers from CNRS and laboratories across France. Since Juice will focus on three of Jupiter’s largest moons, Callisto, Ganymede and Europa, the SPIDER team has taken advantage of Juno’s flybys of Europa and Ganymede to improve the modelling of these two environments. This should be particularly helpful in terms of mission planning and future operation of the instruments.

One of SPIDER’s services, developed by INAF to do run-on-requests, first of the exosphere of Mercury and then of Jupiter’s Galilean moons, has used Juno data to consolidate models defined by ESA in the planning stages of the Juice mission. The SPIDER results reveal differences between Juno’s observations and the models, which can be used to better prepare Juice and redefine future mission scenarios.

The Juice Science Working Team is also looking at various options for using extra propellant made available, thanks to the mission’s very precise and successful launch by the Ariane 5 rocket. Options could be to go to higher latitudes, to extend the tour, or go more quickly to Ganymede; however, a key decision factor is the radiation dose that the spacecraft would be exposed to during each scenario. The SPIDER team has started updating ESA’s radiation model with Juno observations and this work will be useful in choosing the orbits that will make the best compromise between safety and science return. Although it’s early days and an updated and more detailed radiation model will be needed, this pioneering work within SPIDER has demonstrated that data from Juno can give the insights needed on the environments around the Galilean Moons.

SPIDER tools have also been used on the vast data archive compiled by ESA’s Mars Express mission over more than 20 years to study phenomena over a long time period. A team led by Yoshifumi Futaana at IRF in Kiruna used ‘housekeeping’ measurements designed to assess the health and performance of an instrument to understand how cosmic ray counts are suppressed during peaks of activity in the 11-year solar cycle. This study shows how new science can emerge from unexploited data and, hopefully, will inspire other instrument teams to see if they can use SPIDER services to carry out new studies.

Industry Involvement

The SPIDER consortium includes SMEs as well as academic partners. The French company, ONERA, developed software to study electrical charging of spacecraft due to variations in the space environment. Since high-quality modelling tools for the space environment have been developed through Europlanet, ONERA was invited to connect SPIDER services directly to its tools, so that users could benefit from direct access to real observational data. This is now fully operational. ONERA has been active in showcasing these services to ESA and other industrial organisations, which may bring SPIDER to the attention of new audiences and bring in new industrial partners in the future.

Early Career Achievements

The team is particularly proud of the contributions by early career researchers in SPIDER’s achievements to date. CNRS and IRF have hosted a number of six-month internships for Master’s students, who were able to publish their first articles on SPIDER services. Several of the publications in high-impact journals have been led by young, female researchers, including Sarah Pelcener, Martina Moroni, Sae Aizawa, Moa Persson and Lina Hadid.

SPIDER tools have also been embedded into the teaching of Master’s and PhD modules at the Wigner Institute in Hungary. To encourage early career researchers to use and benefit from SPIDER services, we have developed tools in new languages, like Python, which are very popular with young scientists. We have also held workshops targeted at early careers, with hands-on demonstrations of the tools, and are planning a series of webinar tutorials over the coming year.

More generally, we have promoted SPIDER services at various conferences and scientific working group meetings for missions including BepiColombo, Juice, Solar Orbiter and Juno.

Next Steps

There have been a few bumps along the way. At present, only three of SPIDER’s six simulation codes are fully running as run-on-request services. There have also been some difficulties integrating SPIDER services with the EOSC platform, in part because Covid-19 travel restrictions meant that we were not able to travel and meet to discuss integration during the first half of the 2024 RI project. However, Europlanet’s experiences of VESPA-Cloud, through which it participated as an early adopter to explore the deployment of VESPA services in the EOSC infrastructure, are proving helpful in making progress on this front.

SPIDER’s future beyond the Europlanet 2024 RI-funded project is secure. SPIDER’s tools will be maintained by their providers and CNRS will continue to support the central portal. Europlanet will continue to play an important part in sustainability, with EPSC and Europlanet’s Hubs, Working Groups, and dissemination channels (e.g. Discord, webinars and YouTube) providing new opportunities for people to get involved in using and developing SPIDER services, for example by exploiting links with Machine Learning.

As the Sun’s activity increases over the next two years, and we reach solar maximum, SPIDER’s tools and services should be ever more in demand. We encourage the planetary community to try them out, benefit from them and maximise the planetary space weather data that can be used and tested with SPIDER.

Links

Find out more about SPIDER services.

Issue 7 of Europlanet Magazine

This article is featured in the Europlanet 2024 RI Special Issue of the Europlanet Magazine