Space Situational Awareness: Space Weather

Space weather refers to the environmental conditions in Earth's magnetosphere, ionosphere and thermosphere due to the Sun and the solar wind that can influence the functioning and reliability of spaceborne and ground-based systems and services or endanger property or human health.

Space weather deals with phenomena involving ambient plasma, magnetic fields, radiation, particle flows and other physical happenings in space. At ESA, the scientific properties of space weather are studied by a number of teams and offices, and it is also a key element of SSA activity.

About space weather

The SWE Data Centre is located at ESA's Redu Station, Belgium; the SWE Service Coordination Centre (SSCC) is located at the Royal Observatory Belgium (ROB) campus, Brussels.

SWE Segment

As part of ESA's SSA Preparatory Programme, the Space Weather (SWE) Segment focuses on services for owners/operators of satellites in space and infrastructure on the ground. ESA's SWE services will enable end-users in a wide range of affected sectors to mitigate the effects of space weather on their systems, reducing costs and improving reliability.

Southern lights due to geomagnetic storm

In Europe's economy today, numerous sectors are potentially affected by space weather, ranging from space-based telecommunications, broadcasting, weather services and navigation through to power distribution and terrestrial communications, especially at northern latitudes.

Each of these sectors has a need for space weather data and services, together with a further requirement for those services to be tailored to their particular application.

The SSA SWE Segement will focus on delivering services to customers working in:

• Spacecraft design
• Spacecraft operation
• Human space flight
• Launch operation
• Trans-ionospheric radio communications
• SSA surveillance & tracking
• Non-space system operation

... and many more.

SWE team

ESA's SWE team is based at ESAC, ESA's European Space Astronomy Centre, and is supported by scientists and experts from across the Agency and from European industrial teams.

The team is led by Juha-Pekka Luntama, of Finland, an experienced project manager and atmospheric and space weather observation systems scientist. He is assisted by Dr Alexi Glover, who has long experience in ESA's Space Weather Applications Pilot Project and in the Space Weather European Network (SWENET).

"We are developing the SWE Segment by exploiting European expertise in the space weather area. Europe has some of the world's top experts in solar and magnetospheric physics and many institutes and organisations have already established space-weather services. Under the SSA Programme, our objective is to coordinate and support these activities to provide services that will help protect European spaceborne and ground-based assets from damage by space weather events," says Luntama.

Precursor services overview

In order to achieve reliable services, constant monitoring of the space environment from a range of vantage points is needed, together with timely dissemination of reliable data to the service users.

ESA's Proba-2 mission carries several highly sensitive solar instruments

The raw measurements must be fed into advanced computational models and tools in order to give both near-real-time information and advanced warning of upcoming space weather conditions that may affect a diverse range of users' systems.

Europe already has a wealth of expertise and assets providing high-quality scientific observations, results and models as well as a number of space weather products to local customers. ESA's SSA SWE segment intends to build on this foundation and work toward a federated space-weather service-provision concept, avoiding duplication and ensuring that these existing assets and resources play a key role in Europe's new SSA system.

Kanzelhöhe Observatory: an existing European centre of expertise that could be federated into SSA services

SWE services will centre around the SWE Data Centre at ESA's Redu station and a new SWE Service Coordination Centre (SSCC), located in Belgium at a location to be defined during the SSA Preparatory Programme.

In addition, a number of Expert Service Centres (ESC) based on existing centres of expertise will be developed in the SWE-participating Member States.

These centres will focus on specific capabilities, such as solar weather, ionospheric weather, the geomagnetic environment or the orbital radiation environment.

ESCs will act as focal points within the SWE architecture for expertise, data and products in that area from across Europe.

Measurement infrastructure & technology development

During the SSA preparatory phase, an assessment of the space segment needed to fulfil SSA SWE requirements will be carried out. This will focus on identifying the instrumentation needed for performing the observations and the optimal locations from which to make these observations in order to achieve the wide range of coverage needed.

The development of a number of key instruments will be initiated during the Preparatory Programme, paving the way for SWE-dedicated payloads to be deployed during the programme's future operational phase. These include solar disk imagers, a wide-angle coronagraph and instruments designed for in-situ measurement of the solar wind and space environment at critical Earth orbits. In parallel, the SWE team will work together with missions already planned to be flown in key orbits with the aim of establishing collaboration so that SWE instruments may fly onboard these missions in the future.

European IGS stations (click for large size)

The SSA space weather architecture is not limited to space-based measurements. Important data can also be obtained by ground-based observatories and measurement stations.

Data from existing European stations of the International GNSS Service (IGS), ionosonde networks, ground-based magnetometers, and solar observatories are currently producing state-of-the-art data. These data will be fed into the SWE Data Centre to form the basis of future SWE products and services.

In addition, SWE will support the validation and verification of existing, state-of-the-art European models of the space environment with a view to their incorporation into space weather services. End-to-end modelling of space weather phenomena from the Sun to the Earth will be a critical SWE-supporting technology development.