Solar Projector
One of the first projects being showcased here is the Solar Projector web. Vesna did the client-side for it. Currently it's a combination of Bootstrap, jQuery and D3 for graphs.
The data it uses comes from the NASA satellite launched in 1997 called the Advanced Composition Explorer. It has several sensors for monitoring the Earth-Sun interaction. We have since implemented only the display for the two of its sensors. The SWEPAM and the MAG.
The SWEPAM stands for Solar Wind Electron, Proton and Alpha Monitor. The SWEPAM part on the Solar Projector web displays the solar wind velocity. Normal values are around 300-400 m/s. Then there's the proton density and the ion temperature. It can be used to predict the incoming solar storms.
The MAG is a pair of twin, boom-mounted, triaxial fluxgate magnetometers (talk about a mouthful). It monitors the Earth-Sun relationship considering the magnetic field of the Earth. The most important data here are the magnetic field intensity (bt) displayed as the result of the magnetic xyz vector data. Values are in the nT unit.
The data is sent to the NOAA, and then published on the internet. We're parsing that data at certain intervals and offloading the whole thing on our server to play with the dataset.
The Solar Projector was actually made before the new OffSetLab and while the OSL still has some quirks I need to iron out, there are plans for Solar Projector as well. It would be really nice to implement other ACE sensors and change some graphs, along with some interface bits because it was a (re)starting point for us anyway. We'll update the information on it here when the update happens so stay put.
Another satellite launched this year is the DSCOVR (former Triana). The name stands for the Deep Space Climate Observatory. In September this year they plan to have a dedicated web for the data coming from the DSCOVR. We'll see what can be done about getting that data as well and possibly do some correllations with the ACE data. This will be a nice year for observing the environmental conditions from space. Unfortunately, just observing them cannot stop the climate change. It's way past time we do something about that, too.