The ESA Contribution to Solar-B
Opgenoorth, H. (ESA/ESTEC)
The European Spce Agency ESA and the European science community
recognise the importance of the Solar-B mission for the future advancement
of Solar physics and space plasma physics in general. In order to maximise the
outcome of this important mission ESA has decided to facilitate a considerably
increased data-return from the Solar-B. By placing an internal European contract
with the Norwegian Space Centre in Oslo, ESA will make use of the Svalbard
satellite receiving station to provide downlink-contact to all 15 daily orbits of
Solar-B. This will allow a doubling of the original baseline contacts with the satellite
and considerably improve the availibility of Solar-B data. The exact use of this
extra downlink time will have to be discussed in the SWG of Solar-B, but it is clear that
it will considerably improve either the cadence of some measurements or the overall
data delivery from the mission as a whole.
In addition to the ground-station the ESA contract with the Norwegian Space Centre
also includes the construction of a full European mirror datacenter in Oslo, to provide
all the European downlink data to the international collaboration partners and to
cater the European community with high quality mission data. ESA hopes that
these measures will benefit Solar-B as a mission in particular and the international
Solar science community in general. ESA sees this contribution as a part of the
International Living With a Star initiative, in which over 25 space agencies around
the world try to optimise Sun-Earth connection science over the coming decade.
Correspondence
Opegenoorth, Hermann (hopgenoo@rssd.esa.int)
presentation
oral (special talk)