SOW-SWRI 20260221.docx

WISPR Statement of Work

1. Introduction

The Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) is the Navy’s corporate laboratory for conducting basic and applied research in the space sciences. NRL supports a number of terrestrial and space experiments in the areas of terrestrial, atmospheric, solar, and astronomical research from a variety of ground based, airborne, balloon, rocket, and space platforms. Major research thrust areas include ultraviolet remote sensing of the upper atmosphere, spectrographic and imaging studies of the solar atmosphere and heliosphere, and astronomical radiation ranging from ultraviolet through gamma rays. The results are of importance to a fundamental understanding of natural radiation and geophysical phenomena in the space environment, radio communications, and ultimately to the operation of Naval ships and aircraft. Ongoing and planned research includes stand-off detection of the terrestrial environment, in situ and remote sensing of the middle and upper atmosphere, environmental modeling of the geospace environment, studies of the Sun and heliosphere, and studies of high energy celestial sources.

2. Background

Naval Research Laboratory works on coronal tomography and remote diagnosis of the corona using observation data. The data will come from NRL’s Wide Field Imager for Parker Solar Probe (WISPR) which is on board NASA’s Parker Solar Probe (PSP). This consists of data analysis from WISPR as well is from the PSP. NRL has been working on the specific tasks of understanding and developing the WISPR data and is positioned to take advantage of that early development. NRL currently has a team that recognized expert in stable photometric separation of Thomson-scattered signal from various backgrounds, an analytic problem that is similar to, but slightly different from, the standard background subtraction of the WISPR pipeline. This follow-on requirement will continue to research on WISPR and PSP.

3. Scope

The scope of this effort is to provide WISPR support services on board PSP in accordance with the task areas in Section 4 below.

4. Tasks Requirements

4.1 The contractor shall develop algorithmic tools to exploit the WISPR science data downlinked from PSP.

4.1.1 The contractor shall develop, exploit, and publish analysis tools that enable photometric comparison of coronal features within the instrument sensitivity performance and requirements for PSP, using standard file formats such as FITS and standard programming environments such as C, Python, Perl, or IDL.

4.1.2 The contractor shall develop, exploit, and publish experimental methods for tomographic inversion of the coronal structure around PSP, based on translational perspective effects from the motion of PSP through the corona, using standard file formats such as FITS and standard programming environments such as C, Python, Perl, or IDL.

4.1.3 Software tools developed by the contractor for the specific purpose of analyzing PSP/WISPR data under this contract shall be published via the Gnu Public License (GPL) v3 or less restrictive open-source license.

4.2 The contract shall analyze feature motion in the vicinity of the spacecraft path. This shall provide an understanding of the relative importance of spatial and temporal variability of the solar wind in the vicinity of the spacecraft in generating apparent motions in the WISPR images.

4.3 The contractor shall determine the importance and persistence of steady nearly-radially-aligned density features at the mesoscales visible to WISPR, versus time variability of convective and/or variable compact structures

4.4 The contractor shall isolate dust impact ejecta streaks in each WISPR image, to be used both for determination of dust impact frequency and for removal of the streaks from WISPR images.

4.5 The contractor shall provide scientific support to the WISPR team by analyzing coronal structure, using the developed tools and WISPR data.

4.5.1 The contractor shall attend scientific meetings of the WISPR team as applicable.

4.5.2 The contractor shall represent WISPR at relevant scientific conferences, presenting in-progress and completed work as applicable.

4.5.3 The contractor shall publish results in the scientific literature as applicable, and report such publications to the WISPR project scientist.

4.5.4The contractor shall coordinate with other PSP instrument teams, sharing data as applicable.

4.6 The contractor shall utilize software to remove impact ejecta tracks from WISPR images, and methods and plans for using the current stationary point tomography software to track stationary point features in WISPR, and plans to further develop this tomography method to track non-stationary features using the same mathematical formalism.

5. Travel

The contractor shall send a representative to annual Parker Solar Probe public science meetings and to twice-annual Parker Solar Probe science working group meetings to present science results at those meetings.

1. Publications

The contractor shall publish scientific results from these tasks in the open, referred literature. The contractor shall submit drafts IAW with CDRL A003 Scientific and Technical reports. The contractor shall coordinate all publication efforts with NRL prior to submission to referred scientific journals, professional publications, government journals or any other media.

8. Deliverables

Contract Data Requirements List (CDRL):

CDRL A001: Progress reports (quarterly). The report shall include status on progress, and any problems occurring during the reporting period, and solutions found for problems encountered. See CDRL A001 for further details.

CDRL A002: Financial Status (quarterly). The report shall include financial data for the project. See CDRL A002 for further details.

CDRL A003: Scientific and Technical. The contractor shall provide relevant scientific publications and software developed for this project. See CDRL A004 for further details.

CDRL A004: Final Report. A final report in an agreed-to format to be determined. See CDRL A005 for further details.

9. Period of Performance

The period of performance of this effort consists of one (1) twelve-month base year and four (4) twelve-month option years.