The Active Magnetosphere and Planetary Electrodynamics Response Experiment (AMPERE), developed from Jun 2008 to May 2013, and continued as AMPERE-II through Feb 2020, provided the first global, continuous measurements of the electric currents in the near Earth space environment using the satellites of the Iridium constellation. Global, continuous observations from 1 Jan 2010 provided a wealth of science products for over 85 papers covering a wide range of magnetosphere-ionosphere science. Following the success of these previous projects, this award is to support the collection of data from the Iridium NEXT satellites and the development of data products as community resources. In eight launches from Jan 2017 through Jan 2019 the new generation of 75 Iridium NEXT satellites were launched by Iridium Communications Inc. and all NEXT Space Vehicles (SVs) were successfully commissioned and are operating nominally.
The data collected from the NEXT Space Vehicles that are designed to support data collection for AMPERE, will be used to monitor the near-Earth space environment for space weather events, with specific focus on the electric currents at the poles. It will be applied to a variety of phenomena including examination of geomagnetic storms and geomagnetically induced currents. Data is downlinked and transferred to The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL) as each NEXT SV was commissioned and has continued with >99% continuous acquisition and higher sampling rate than previous data sets. This data is openly available to the scientific community and used to understand and monitor space weather for research purposes. The data is also being used in support of NASA and ESA missions and data products are made available at the NSF-NASA funded Community Coordinated Modeling Center.
The AMPERE-NEXT data set has a higher sampling rate than on Block 1 (8 s/sample on NEXT vs 19.4 s/sample on Block 1). Calibration analyses identified multiple contamination signals which required substantial effort to calibrate under AMPERE-II. Nonetheless, the final accuracy of the calibrated data has been shown to be 3 to 4 times better than from Block 1, consistent with the high precision knowledge provided by the star camera system on NEXT. AMPERE-III will provide key observations and derived products of the global Birkeland currents together with analysis tools to enable and facilitate research by the broader community to make major advances in each area. The new capabilities provided by AMPERE-III are: C1. AMPERE-NEXT acquisition through the ascending phase of Cycle 25; C2. Second-generation processing dramatically improving baselines for all AMPERE data; C3. Model & simulation inter-comparison tools hosted at the Community Coordinated Modeling Center; C4. Joint analysis/display tools with SuperMAG and SuperDARN; C5. Regional inversions in global products; C6. Inter-hemispheric comparison products; C7. Custom products for Iridium transition epoch.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
