AE9/AP9/SPM (IRENE) Commercial Deployment and Use · • IRENE = International Radiation Environment Near-Earth = AE9/AP9/SPM –Statistical radiation environment model geared towards

April 18, 2018

Space Weather Workshop

----

Rick Quinn

VP Space Weather

----

Stuart Huston, Chris Roth, Paul Whelan

AE9/AP9/SPM (IRENE)

Commercial Deployment and Use

• International Radiation Environment Near-

Earth development is sponsored by the

Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL)

• Project Lead: Robert Johnston, AFRL

• US Project Team: Paul O’Brien & Tim Guild

(Aerospace), Yi-Jiun Caton (AFRL), Chris

Roth, Justin Charron, Rick Quinn (AER), Stu

Huston (Confluence Analytics)

2

IRENE (AE9/AP9/SPM) Acknowledgements

18-04-2018 AER Company Proprietary Information. © Atmospheric and Environmental Research, Inc. (AER), 2018.

• IRENE = International Radiation Environment

Near-Earth = AE9/AP9/SPM

– Statistical radiation environment model geared

towards satellite design and mission planning

• General considerations in developing

commercial space weather products

– Example: current commercial AER space

weather product

• Leveraging IRENE commercially

18-04-2018 AER Company Proprietary Information. © Atmospheric and Environmental Research, Inc. (AER), 2018. 3

Overview

• Figure out target customer base Who needs information about the radiation environment?

– Satellite designers (want satellites to perform effectively, meet design lifetimes)

– Mission planners (understand impact of environment on missions, perform mission trade-space studies with sat designers)

– Satellite operators (want satellites to perform, understand observed anomalies)

• Identify relevant environment models or research – AE9/AP9/SPM, prior models, SHIELDOSE, etc

• Collect end-user requirements and develop product concept

• Figure out how to pay for development!

4

Creating a Commercial Product in the

Space Weather Domain


• Developing a robust customer-facing product is expensive even when underlying R&D and technology is open source and mature!

– Easily 2 – 4 FTE years or more and $500K - $1M+

• Returns on investment (sales) are difficult to predict and likely small to start

– Difficult to justify development fully on corporate IRAD

– Need to leverage other vehicles; grants or contracts for core IP, SBIRs for interface design and build-out

– Need low-cost entry point for customers so they can gain experience with product value

5

Paying for Product Development in Space

Weather Domain


• STK = AGI’s System ToolKit (formerly Satellite ToolKit) – Widely used commercial desktop application used for satellite and orbit

design

– Plugins available for comm., mission planning, orbit analysis, etc.

– “Instant” potential customer-base for space environment tools

• SEET = AER’s Space Environment and Effects Tool

• STK SEET = SEET plugin for STK – AER adapted IP developed and owned through AFRL support contracts, i.e.

AF-GEOSpace (lowered initial development costs)

– STK SEET computational interfaces were developed by AER using IRAD

– STK SEET GUI and report interfaces were developed by AGI using IRAD

– Sales revenue split under partnership agreement

• Initial release was November 2009

• Leverages AGI’s aggressive sales force

• Sales have been steady but even with our reduced development costs, approximately at the break-even level

6

Current AER Space Weather Product:

STK SEET


SEET Technical Overview

• Five primary components: – Radiation Environment: flux, fluence, dose, dose-rate,

dose-depth

– SAA Transit: fluxes, entrance/exit times

– Magnetic field: IGRF, dipole, Olson-Pfitzer, McIlwain L, field-line tracing/conjugacy, radiation environment indexing

– Particle Impacts: meteor and small man-made environment

– Vehicle Temperature: sphere or plate

• Leverages full STK integration – multi-satellite access function (i.e., field-line conjugacy)

– coordinate transforms (i.e., s/c frames); orbit propagation

– 3D orbit visualization; reporting tools

7 18-04-2018 AER Company Proprietary Information. © Atmospheric and Environmental Research, Inc. (AER), 2018.

• Trapped (flux, fluence, dose at locations)

– CRRESRAD, APEXRAD

– CRRESELE, CRRESPRO

– NASA AE8/AP8

– SHIELDDOSE2

• Untrapped (fluence v energy over orbit)

– GCR: CREME86, ISO-15390, and Badhwar-

O’Neill 2010

– SEP: JPL-91, Rosenqvist, ESP

8

Current Radiation Environment Component

Models


9

Radiation Belts Snapshot

Electron radiation flux cross-section for particles at 0.95 MeV based on the NASAELE model. Higher values are concentrated in two belts, the Van Allen radiation belts. From STK 3D visualization components.


10

Radiation Belts Snapshot

Proton radiation flux cross-section for particles at 5.7 MeV based on the NASAPRO model. Higher values are concentrated in the inner Van Allen radiation belt. From STK 3D visualization components.


SAA Transit

• South Atlantic Anomaly: region of enhanced high-energy protons at LEO due to offset magnetic dipole

• Based on SAA studies/data by AFRL (Ginet et al, 2009) – needs update!

– accounts for drift due to secular magnetic field changes (from previous models)

– based on TSX5 CEASE data analysis

• provides fluxes for user-selectable energy ranges

• provides satellite SAA entrance/exit times based on user-specified flux threshold

11 18-04-2018 AER Company Proprietary Information. © Atmospheric and Environmental Research, Inc. (AER), 2018.

12

SAA Transit Snapshots


13

SAA Transit Snapshots


• 2017 largest sales year since 2012

• Expanding market with new cube-sat manufacturers

• Need to leverage expanding market into further growth!

– Radiation environment models are outdated!

– IRENE (International Radiation Environment Near-Earth aka AE9/AP/SPM) is widely available and AER develops the deliverable codebase for AFRL (deep knowledge)

14

STK SEET: Potential for Growth


• New de facto standard for mission planning and satellite radiation design

• Quantification of uncertainty due to measurements and space weather variation

• Monte-Carlo estimation of environments above percentile thresholds

• Parallel processing capability available since v1.35 (current released version is v1.50)

• High time-resolution long mission lifetime still takes a long time to compute

• Mature open-source environment model!

15

IRENE/AE9/AP9 Background


• Host a service for providing AE9/AP9 model calculations for satellite industry

– Ax9 model calculations can be compute intensive

– Recent v1.35 update makes Ax9 parallel capable

• Deploy scalable backend server on Amazon AWS

– Scalability for fast runs and multiple concurrent users

• Expose multi-user web service to internet

• Support multiple end-user client applications

– Modified Ax9 desktop GUI

– Custom clients for specific customers

– STK SEET as client

16

AE9/AP9/IRENE Commercialization

Strategy


• Ax9/IRENE back-end deployed within STK

SEET software for desktop and/or enclave use

• Configuration determines whether local or

remote AWS instance of IRENE is used

• Remote AWS usage incurs separate charges to

AER for utilizing that service

• Drives direct STK SEET sales/maintenance and

recurring service charges (when remote service

is used)

17

Integration with STK SEET


Documents

AE9/AP9/SPM (IRENE) Commercial Deployment and Use · • IRENE = International Radiation Environment Near-Earth = AE9/AP9/SPM –Statistical radiation environment model geared towards