Solar Data Viewer

The Space and Atmospheric Physics group, within the Department of Physics, is involved in two space missions to study the Sun: IMAP and Solar Orbiter. Imperial researchers lead the second mission and for both they have develop a high precission magnetometer that allows to measure the local magnetic field around the spacecrafts.

The value of these missions are of fundamental interests - to better understand solar physics - but also can play a key role in space weather forecasting, helping to predict when, and how badly, instense solar activity can affect electronic systems on Earth, from telecomunications to navigation or power grids.

At present, some of this information is made available through static or ad-hoc dashboards. For example, Solar Orbiter data is currently displayed via a regularly updated static image dashboard. While functional, this approach limits accessibility, interactivity and long-term scalability. Moreover, there is no real time comparion of this live data with that of other missions like ACE or SOLAR-1.

The purpose of this engagement was to setup interactive dashboards to facilitate the real time access to this data to researchers, weather forecasters and the wide public, so they can take action as needed.

The RSE Team help setting up a database collecting the data from all missions of interest and then created a dashboard using Bokeh displaying all the magnetic field and solar wind data, as well as the position of the spacecrafts in space. A Django application was used as intermediary to pull the data and processed it before sending it to the dashboards.

A second dashboard was setup using Grafana for internal use of the researchers, monitoring health data of the mission and the different instruments. Grafana was the chosen technology as it has minimal maintenance and integrates well with mobile devices, a requirement of the project since researchers will normally be checking the spacecrafts health from there.