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Showing posts with label swarm. Show all posts
Showing posts with label swarm. Show all posts

Swarm 10th Anniversary and Science Conference: Copenhagen, 8-12 April 2024

  May 14, 2024 IAGA-AIGA Blog   , , ,

On 8–12 April 2024, a special event took place in Copenhagen, Denmark, to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Swarm mission, with a conference dedicated to scientific advances it has driven in studies of Earth’s interior, ocean, atmosphere and space environment. 

The “Swarm 10th Anniversary and Science Conference”, organized by the European Space Agency and hosted by DTU Space in CPH Conference Centre in Copenhagen, brought together a wide community with expertise spanning the entire Earth system from the core, through the mantle and crust, the oceans and atmosphere, all the way out to the edge of the magnetosphere, with an eye to the many new applications beyond the scope of the original mission objectives.

The conference was attended by more than 220 participants, with 70 talks and 106 posters, from many different institutions in Europe, America and Asia.

The results presented during the week showcased ground-breaking scientific contributions made by the Swarm mission, setting out in detail what has been learnt about the Earth and its space environment from the magnetic and electric field variations recorded over the past 10 years. Insights from modelling efforts as well as wide-ranging implications were discussed. Many novel and unexpected applications of Swarm measurements were also presented, and exciting directions for future progress were set out.

The event was also dedicated to the celebration of Swarm’s “birthday”, with inspiring speeches from mission PI’s, scientists, mission managers and people who have been involved in Swarm mission since the very beginning.

These first 10 years of our mission in orbit are a major milestone that we would like to further mark by creating collections of papers on Swarm related topics. For this reason, the following Special issues have been launched to cover the full range of Swarm related science, in which all those interested are kindly invited to submit contributions:

  • Special issue on  Physics of the Earth and Planetary Interiors. The focus of this special issue will be scientific advances in our understanding of internal field sources (including core dynamics, lithospheric magnetization, induction in the solid Earth and oceans).

    All submissions are welcome beginning on 1st May 2024 up until 31st October 2024. Please submit via the PEPI website and choose article type “VSI:Terr. Magnetism & Swarm".

    Please send an email to gbalasis@noa.gr until May 24th, 2024, expressing your interest by indicating a potential title of your intended submission. Submission deadline of the full articles is expected to be at the end of 2024, while the TI in JSWSC is expected to be launched end of May / beginning of June 2024.

Further details about the event can be found at: https://www.swarm-anniversary-and-science.org/.

ESA Swarm constellation. Image credit: ESA/ATG Medialab


Contributed by Enkelejda Qamili, Chris Finlay, Erwan Thébault, Alexander Grayver and George Balasis

Space magnetometry from Swarm and beyond

  November 04, 2023 IAGA-AIGA Blog   , , , ,

The Swarm satellite mission is ESA's fourth Earth Explorer in space since late 2013. As we prepare to
celebrate 10 years of successful operations (and looking forward to many years more!), the Swarm community met 10-12 October 2023 in sunny Frascati, Italy, for the thirteenth Data Quality Workshop to compare notes and plan for the future of the mission to explore Earth's magnetic field.

With the foremost minds in satellite magnetometry gathered in one room, and expertise ranging from geophysics, space instrumentation and operations to software engineering, this regular meeting is always exciting. Swarm's primary three spacecraft (https://visuals.earth.esa.int/satellites/swarm), as well as other contributing spacecraft, continue to provide invaluable measurements that probe many phenomena, from the flow of material in Earth's core to electric currents above the atmosphere driven by solar activity. We have been able to improve the data quality (i.e. improved calibration and error correction) year-on-year and continue to evolve and grow the large portfolio of data products and services which have enabled scientists to publish over 500 research papers so far, as well as providing critical input to many applications, from navigation and mineral exploration to space weather prediction.

There are two new advances in the data delivery worth mentioning here. Firstly, there is the implementation of a new "FAST" processing chain, which makes data available within a few hours (subject to down-linking constraints imposed by the satellite orbits and ground station locations). This makes it possible to use Swarm for same-day space weather monitoring. The second point is in connection with the VirES data access and exploitation platform which radically increases the accessibility of the data. We are building new capabilities in the on-demand processing of data through the SwarmPAL software, where scientists contribute algorithms and tooling that are made more flexible and coherent through the adoption of a common framework.

The growing opportunities don't stop there though. On 13th October, some of us from the Swarm workshop travelled on to the Royal Astronomical Society, London, for another meeting showing some of the first results from the newly launched Macau Science Satellite (MSS-1). This new mission offers highly complementary data to Swarm and we expect new research analysing the joint dataset over the coming years. With the growing number of operators of high-precision magnetometers in space, the need to collaborate and coordinate is more important than ever.

For more news about Swarm, click here.



Ashley Smith is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Edinburgh, working as part of the Swarm DISC (Data, Innovation, and Science Cluster). He is passionate about computing technologies and open source software and his research interests include geomagnetic field modelling and space weather. He can be contacted by email at ashley.smith@ed.ac.uk.





Come and join in with Magnetic Earth!

  June 14, 2021 IAGA-AIGA Blog   , ,

 

Magnetic Earth is a web resource to share the science of geomagnetism. Aimed at students and new researchers (or anyone with an interest), I created the website to provide a friendly introduction to the subject with links to other locations on the internet for people to dig deeper. Moving forward, I want to encourage contributions from others in order to grow this concept as an open community hub to help people navigate research activities, tools, and organisations relevant to studying Earth’s magnetic field.


At magneticearth.org you will find a handful of pages with very short introductions to topics related to geomagnetism - mainly about global field modelling as that is what I am familiar with. The content is intentionally kept succinct so that it can quickly give a very broad overview of many areas and be understandable by a wide audience. It is not a tutorial, but a starting point and reference to interlink other resources on the web.


At swarm.magneticearth.org (“Swarm Notebooks”) you will find a collection of Python-based recipes that can help scientists get started with accessing and analysing data from ESA’s Swarm spacecraft mission which is mapping and monitoring Earth’s magnetic field from space. I am developing this as part of my work in supporting the Swarm Virtual Research Environment - a project which provides a cloud-based computing environment enabling people to more easily write and run code directly through a web browser. The wider goal here is to foster more collaboration and development of sustainable software to interact with Swarm mission products. The Swarm Notebooks website is an example of a more in-depth guide that can be linked to from Magnetic Earth.

How can you help?

An informational resource is only as useful as its content. With more voices we can cover more stuff and multiply its usefulness, so I am trying to make it as easy as possible for anyone to contribute!

  1. Take a quick look at the website - is it useful to you? what is missing?

  2. Check the instructions there for the multiple ways you can give feedback or get involved

How does it work?

The website is generated from code which sits in a repository on GitHub, under the Magnetic Earth GitHub Organisation. GitHub provides the collaborative tooling that lets us robustly and openly develop the website, and directly publish it using GitHub Pages - all for free. I own the magneticearth.org domain so that we have a nicer URL, and it also leaves the option open to change the web hosting without changing the location.


The code-driven approach to the website makes it more difficult for people with fewer software skills to edit it but is a longer term maintainable solution - the content source files are written in Markdown so can be transferred to different website generation systems in the future. To alleviate this problem, I provide several no-code ways that people can submit suggestions for content changes/additions. The spirit with which I have set up the website is following in the footsteps of several other great resources out there, such as The Turing Way - a guide to open source community-driven data science.


Ashley Smith is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Edinburgh, working as part of the Swarm DISC (Data, Innovation, and Science Cluster). He is passionate about computing technologies and open source software and his research interests include geomagnetic field modelling and space weather. He can be contacted by email at ashley.smith@ed.ac.uk.


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