SHIELDS Final Technical Report

Technical Report · Tue Oct 03 04:00:00 EDT 2017

DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/1396150· OSTI ID:1396150

Jordanova, Vania Koleva ^[1]

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1. Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)

Predicting variations in the near-Earth space environment that can lead to spacecraft damage and failure, i.e. “space weather”, remains a big space physics challenge. A new capability was developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) to understand, model, and predict Space Hazards Induced near Earth by Large Dynamic Storms, the SHIELDS framework. This framework simulates the dynamics of the Surface Charging Environment (SCE), the hot (keV) electrons representing the source and seed populations for the radiation belts, on both macro- and micro-scale. In addition to using physics-based models (like RAM-SCB, BATS-R-US, and iPIC3D), new data assimilation techniques employing data from LANL instruments on the Van Allen Probes and geosynchronous satellites were developed. An order of magnitude improvement in the accuracy in the simulation of the spacecraft surface charging environment was thus obtained. SHIELDS also includes a post-processing tool designed to calculate the surface charging for specific spacecraft geometry using the Curvilinear Particle-In-Cell (CPIC) code and to evaluate anomalies' relation to SCE dynamics. Such diagnostics is critically important when performing forensic analyses of space-system failures.

• Research Organization: Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE
• DOE Contract Number: AC52-06NA25396
• OSTI ID: 1396150
• Report Number(s): LA--UR-17-28899
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS
Heliospheric and Magnetospheric Physics