Solar System Research
(site under construction)
SpaceGRID
- Solar System Research Questionnaire
please submit your entries by 28th Feb 2002
This site provides information on the Solar System Research component of the ESA SpaceGRID project.
SpaceGRID is an ESA study aimed at identifying the potential benefits of “Grids” to the ESA community and defining a road map for the implementation of this technology within ESA. Grid technology is an emerging computing infrastructure that is intended to provide uniform access to a set of distributed networked resources that would otherwise be incompatible. Depending on the Grid application, the resources may be large-scale computational systems, data-archives or shared facilities constituting a collaborative working environment.
One area being considered by the study is Solar System Research (SSR), encompassing activities in Solar, Solar Terrestrial and Planetary research. This is an active area of ESA’s current (Cassini/Huygens, Cluster and SOHO) and future (SMART-I, Mars-Express, Rosetta, Bepi-Columbo and Solar Orbiter) programme. In the case of SSR the main benefits of the SpaceGRID are expected to come from the provision of uniform location, manipulation, access and sharing of online data. This will free the end user from many of the laborious routine data handling tasks allowing more time to be concentrate on the analysis. The ability to search multiple distributed datasets and return a single combined data product will simplify event identification and opens the way for new areas of interdisciplinary analysis. A key part of this will be the ability for individual users and groups to “plug-in” to the SpaceGRID not only to retrieve data from existing central archive sites but also to provide access to their own data via a local Grid-site.
The SSR requirements for SpaceGRID are being developed by a group of scientists and software engineers who already have a background in the SSR field and are actively involved in current ESA projects covering the three SSR disciplines. Input from and participation by the community from the outset is seen as an important step to ensuring the ultimate success of SpaceGRID.
SpaceGRID Solar System Research Requirements Analysis
SpaceGRID Solar System Research Infrastructure Requirements
SpaceGRID requirements presentation from EGS 2002