This is a grant awarded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Shared Services Center to the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), a nonprofit research and development organization based in San Antonio, Texas. The grant, valued at $812,318.00, is for research to identify the dominant upstream and shock parameters that influence Energetic Storm Particle (ESP) properties and lead to their event-to-event variability, in order to advance the understanding of coronal mass...
This is a $495,440 grant awarded by NASA's Shared Services Center to the Space Science Institute, a nonprofit organization based in Boulder, Colorado. The grant supports research to investigate the generation and characteristics of waves produced by relativistic electron beams in solar plasma environments, with the goal of improving understanding of the energy partitioning and propagation of solar energetic particles. The research will utilize laboratory experiments, simulations, and comparisons...
This is a $211,500.00 grant awarded by NASA to the University of Arizona to study the origin and transport of energetic charged particles and cosmic rays in the heliosphere. The grant will support a focused and detailed study using spacecraft data, theory, and numerical simulations to investigate the acceleration of charged particles from thermal to superthermal energies. The research aims to develop modern theories and sophisticated models to make predictions that can be compared with in-situ...
This is a $398,679.58 grant awarded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) for solar energetic particle (SEP) forecasting research. The goal is to develop the capability to forecast SEP occurrence, onset time, peak intensities, and heavy ion properties using data-intensive studies and artificial intelligence approaches. The research will analyze relationships between solar photospheric features, eruptions, and flares, and associated...
This is a $530,331.01 grant awarded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to the University of Arizona, doing business as the Arizona Board of Regents, to investigate the spatial distribution of energetic particles across interplanetary shocks. The research aims to study the local intensity enhancements, or "spikes", of supra-thermal particles at the shock front, which are not well-explained by current theoretical models. The project will analyze high-resolution...
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) awarded a $697,981 grant to the Space Science Institute (SSI), a nonprofit research organization in Boulder, Colorado. The grant supports research to study waves generated by accelerated particles in the Earth's magnetosphere and their impact on space weather. The research will utilize data from the ARTEMIS spacecraft, the VLASIATOR simulation code, and a new analytical model to examine the properties and dynamics of ultra-low frequency...
This is a 3-year grant awarded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) on November 17, 2016 to the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), a nonprofit research organization based in San Antonio, Texas. The $362,015.59 grant is for a study to determine the dominant processes that lead to an asymmetric plasma sheet structure, as observed by the Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) satellite. The research will leverage IBEX data along with in-situ measurements from other...
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) awarded a $961,758 grant to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) to conduct research in understanding and predicting solar energetic particle (SEP) events. The research will leverage Caltech's new simulation tool that couples 3D magnetohydrodynamic models of coronal mass ejections with 3D solutions of the focused transport equation to study both individual SEP events and general characteristics determined from survey studies....
This is a $143,551.05 federal grant awarded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to the Space Science Institute, a nonprofit research organization based in Boulder, Colorado. The goal of the project is to develop an adaptive hybrid computational model that combines kinetic ion and fluid electron descriptions to enable more detailed simulations of turbulent solar wind conditions and their impacts on the Earth's magnetosphere. The model will be integrated with global...
This is a $330,921.99 grant awarded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) to advance the understanding of energy transfer and coupling processes between plasma and magnetic fields in the solar wind near Earth. The grant supports research objectives including determining the polytropic indices of the solar wind plasma, identifying relationships between magnetic field strength and plasma parameters, and distinguishing these...
This is a $647,433.47 grant awarded to the Southwest Research Institute by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to conduct a systematic study of the physics of energetic storm particle (ESP) events near Earth orbit. The study aims to advance the understanding of how interplanetary coronal mass ejections (ICMEs) accelerate ESP in interplanetary space by examining the relationship between locally observed shock properties and ESP properties, the effects of ambient turbulence and suprathermal seed populations on ESP properties, and the causes of intra-event variability in ESP observations. The research will utilize the Particle Acceleration and Transport (PATH) model and analyze energetic ion, solar wind, and interplanetary magnetic field measurements from various spacecraft. This grant is not associated with a set-aside contract.