Research project PX/8/SS/07 (Research action PX)
The Telescience project (TLS) is a transversal backbone activity of the SIDC supporting scientific data exploitation and instrument operations. It allows cross-fertilization and gives consistency to the various orientations of our scientific investigations. The purpose of the TLS project is to provide easy, standardized access to data from the multiple space missions and other data acquisition projects that we are involved in, and at the same time provide support to manage the technical and practical issues arising in these projects. A new element is that we intend to not only continue this data archive maintenance and data access provision as a purely technical task, but want to generate metadata information for the data archive (e.g. in the form of event catalogues) to facilitate appropriate data retrieval by the interested researcher. This is especially relevant as larger amounts of data will become available in the near future, while human resources cannot grow proportionally. TLS is paving the way to instrument planning and primary archiving that will be under our responsibility during the PROBA2 mission.
The technical TLS activity at ROB is organized around three objectives:
- Collecting data to drive our research and operational services; they originate from space missions (originally EIT-SOHO) as well as from ROB solar telescopes.
- Database development meant to ease storing, searching and retrieving the characteristics in our various datasets. It further permits scientific study and selective dissemination.
- Web pages and database interface tools.
With the accelerating archiving rate, and the subsequent huge amounts of available solar physics data, all 3 types of technical Telescience activities are anticipated to grow in the future. With the launch of STEREO, we expect to import more data than ever before. The same is true for LYRA and SWAP, our PROBA2 payloads. In this latter case, we are officially in charge of the ground segment, implying that we will not just collect the FITS files, but reformat the raw telemetry into FITS. Furthermore, we will be responsible for the generation of the telecommanding scripts for both instruments. Though the preparation of these tasks currently forms part of the instrument development projects, it is foreseen that after launch, these activities fall under the Telescience project in view of their more technical nature. This brings an additional component to TLS in the future, although some experience with instrument control has been gathered along the years, particularly with the regular EIT shutterless campaigns.
Satellite(s) or flight opportunity(ies):
- SOHO
Field of research:
Space Sciences: Solar System: solar and plasma physics
