Characterizing Space Environments with Long-Term Space Plasma Archive Resources

Abstract

A significant scientific benefit of establishing and maintaining long-term space plasma data archives is the ready access the archives afford to resources required for characterizing spacecraft design environments. Space systems must be capable of operating in the mean environments driven by climatology as well as the extremes that occur during individual space weather events. Long- term time series are necessary to obtain quantitative information on environment variability and extremes that characterize the mean and worst case environments that may be encountered during a mission. In addition, analysis of large data sets are important to scientific studies of flux limiting processes that provide a basis for establishing upper limits to environment specifications used in radiation or charging analyses. We present applications using data from existing archives and highlight their contributions to space environment models developed at Marshall Space Flight Center including the Chandra Radiation Model, ionospheric plasma variability models, and plasma models of the L2 space environment.