Specification of the Surface Charging Environment with SHIELDS

We present a recently funded project through the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) Directed Research and Development (LDRD) program that aims at developing a new space weather capability to understand, model, and predict... [ view full abstract ]

We present a recently funded project through the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) Directed Research and Development (LDRD) program that aims at developing a new space weather capability to understand, model, and predict Space Hazards Induced near Earth by Large Dynamic Storms, the SHIELDS framework. SHIELDS is an end-to-end model of the magnetosphere driven by the dynamic solar wind, designed to predict one of the most harmful space-weather hazards: the spacecraft surface-charging environment (SCE). A thorough understanding of SCE, the hot (keV) electrons representing the source and seed populations for the radiation belts, is needed to strengthen spacecraft design when it comes to hazard mitigation. The SHIELDS project goals are to understand the dynamics of the SCE on both macro- and micro-scale including important physics related to rapid particle injection and acceleration associated with magnetospheric storms/substorms, as well as plasma waves. These challenging problems are addressed using a team of world-class experts in the fields of space science and computational plasma physics, and state-of-the-art models and computational facilities. In addition to 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 are developed. SHIELDS simulations demonstrate that the data assimilation can capture storm phenomena that otherwise would be missed and improve by an order of magnitude the characterization of the SCE in near-Earth regions where operational satellites reside.