New Tools for Analysis of Space-Borne Sounding Data

I.A. Galkin, G.M. Khmyrov, A. Kozlov, B.W. Reinisch, X. Huang, and G.S. Sales


In an effort to maximize the efficiency of the space exploration, research
agencies are beginning to open public access to the complete, high-resolution
datasets from their missions. This paper discusses a new generation of software
tools designed to support the full range of data manipulation services for the
high-resolution dataset from the Radio Plasma Imager (RPI) aboard NASAÕs IMAGE
spacecraft.

The software tools, known collectively as the ÒRPI BinBrowserÓ, target a wide
user community ranging from college students to the domain experts, and from the
casual visitors to the RPI science team members. The BinBrowser therefore admits
a wide variety of computing platforms and data access scenarios. To accommodate
for the platform inhomogeneity, the core of BinBrowser is written in Java, and
its installation can be done seamlessly over the Web (refer to
http://ulcar.uml.edu for more details). The BinBrowser workstations can
communicate over the Internet with the central database at UML where RPI
telemetry, derived, orbital and predicted geophysical data are archived. Where
connection bandwidth permits, the UML database provides the complete raster of
data products to the BinBrowser user. Binary telemetry data files can be
acquired independently on CD-ROMs, DVD-ROMs, or over Internet from NSSDC and
other RPI data dissemination institutions, so that the traffic between
BinBrowser workstations and the UML database can be significantly reduced to the
data catalog queries and requests of auxiliary data. An important part of the
auxiliary data stored in the UML database is the expert ratings. The expert
ratings allow a novice user to subset the whole archive to the measurements
considered worthy of attention by the experts registered with UML and to set the
suggested BinBrowser visualization options to create the optimal data
presentation. Finally, BinBrowser can operate in an offline mode to browse
through the locally stored RPI telemetry data files.

The BinBrowser visualization and analysis tools are specific to the RPI
instrument. As a radio sounder, RPI takes images of the surrounding plasma in
the range-frequency domain, ÒplasmagramsÓ. Echoes from the plasma features
within the radar range form traces on the plasmagrams. The BinBrowser provides
means for interactive highlighting of the traces and calculation of the electron
density along the echo paths. The echo arrival angles can be calculated as well,
so that the trace data are presented as an ÒechomapÓ indicating locations of the
plasma features responsible for the trace formation. Further technical details
of the BinBrowser implementation are briefly discussed.

The RPI BinBrowser tool brings a new potential for analysis of high-resolution
datasets by combining powerful platform-independent software solutions with the
ease of data access, search and referencing to the expert knowledge.

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Proceedings 2001 USNC/URSI National Radio Science Meeting, p. 304, 
Boston, U.S.A., 2001