The Heliospheric Physics Laboratory (HPL) is a component of the Heliophysics Science Division of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, located in Suburban Maryland, USA.
The HPL leads in the exploration of the heliosphere through the development of instruments and models designed to determine the origin and evolution of the solar wind, low energy cosmic rays, and the interaction of the Sun's heliosphere with the local interstellar medium.
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September 2009 Notices: Two weekend service outages will occur in September. All SPDF services (CDAWeb, SSCWeb, TIPSOD, OMNIWeb, COHOWeb, etc.) will NOT be available September 11, 5pm - September 14, 8am EDT AND September 18, 5pm - September 21, 8am EDT.
Please plan your use of the systems accordingly.
New Missions Supported in CDAWeb and SSCWeb
Data from all THEMIS instruments and the SWAVES experiments on STEREO A/B are now available via CDAWeb. THEMIS orbit data (including long range predicts) are now supported in SSCWeb, STEREO orbits are supported in both SSCWeb and HelioWeb.
Source of Energetic Particles in the Heliosheath
New research by John Cooper (672) on interpretation of Voyager 1 energetic particle data in the heliosheath is the subject of the Goddard news article "In Search of Interstellar Dragon Fire" and reposted on several news web sites. This article is based on his paper in the proceedings of the 2007 International Cosmic Ray Conference in Merida, Mexico. His work suggests that heliosheath energetic protons and heavier ions originate from sources in local interstellar space beyond the heliosheath and not from acceleration at the solar wind termination shock.
Several Recent Awards to the SECEF Team
"Path of Totality, Eclipse - Measuring Angular Size and Distance", a half-hour movie for middle school, has won a 2007 CINE Gold Eagle Award in the category of Children's Education and Entertainment. This video was resulted from a partnership between Sun-Earth Connection Education Forum (SECEF, 672) and NASA Connect in Spring 2006. CINE's mission is to serve emerging and established film, video, and new media professionals as career-advancing peer group and honors a wide range of talent worldwide through its prestigious CINE Golden Eagle Awards.
The 2006 webcast "Total Solar Eclipse: Live from Turkey" was honored with a People's Choice Webby Award in the 11TH ANNUAL WEBBY AWARDS (May 2007). The Webby Award is the leading international award honoring excellence on the Internet. Each year, the People's Voice Awards garners hundreds of thousands of votes from all over the world. The Exploratorium in partnership with NASA's Sun-Earth Connection Education Forum (SECEF, 672) and the STEREO mission produced the webcast, which featured the March 29, 2006 total solar eclipse.
Heliophysics Science Data Policy
The newest release to the document is available from NASA Heliophysics Science Data Management Policy; the link to the PDF and html versions of the latest version are in the middle of the first paragraph.
