Prelude to High Performance Computing on Magnetospheric Multi Scale: The REE/STP
 Plasma Moment Application Applied to HAWKEYE Data

M. K. Bhat
M. L. Rilee
S. A. Boardsen
S. A. Curtis

Raytheon ITSS
NASA GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER
GREENBELT, MD 20771

Magnetospheric Multi Scale (MMS, launch 2006) is a tightly coupled
constellation of five spacecraft that is to study the fundamental
processes that underlie the structure and dynamics of the Earth's
magnetosphere.  It is a member of NASA's Solar-Terrestrial Probe line
and is an important step in NASA's Sun-Earth Connections roadmap.  MMS
has a full complement of space plasma diagnostic equipment which
operate in "normal" and "burst" modes. These modes limit the amount of
data produced by the scientific instrumentation so that resource
limits are not exceeded.  The higher resolution "burst" mode operates
on limited portions of the MMS orbit and both modes store data for
later transmission to Earth.  By performing some analyses on board
MMS, mission science return may be increased.  The data processing
function of spacecraft is usually sized to perform command & data
handling and perhaps attitude control which limits its applicability
for on board science work.  Therefore, detailed analyses of plasma
diagnostic data on board spacecraft require another source of
computation.

NASA's Remote Exploration and Experimentation (REE) Project is
developing a prototype flight processor that may dramtically improve
the amount of computing available onboard spacecraft.  After particle
detector calibrations and spacecraft attitude determinations have been
made, a common technique for plasma analysis is the construction of
fluid moments of plasma particle detector data.  The Plasma Moment
Application (PMA) was developed by the REE Solar Terrestrial Probe
line Science Application Team (REE/STP) to make use of REE 's high
performance architecture and represents a first step towards
autonomous onboard analysis.

One goal of the PMA is to produce routine science products,
e.g. moments of the plasma distribution function, in real time to
support onboard science data management and space weather studies.
The PMA is not dependent on any particular sampling scheme of the
plasma distribution function (PDF) and can readily be applied to a
variety of PDF analyses.  In previous work, we have shown (1) how PMA
uses multiple processors, (2) how data is distributed across those
processors, and (3) how near level-zero data from the HAWKEYE
spacecraft could be brought into the PMA.  From this previous work, we
concluded that plasma analysis is amenable to parallel computation.

In this work, we continue this program by using PMA to analyze a
greater portion of the archived HAWKEYE data.  HAWKEYE's full
complement of simple plasma diagnostic instruments and unique high
polar orbit make its data scientifically important and we believe
amenable to methods of automated data analysis.  We present plasma
moments calculated along HAWKEYE's entire orbit, but will concentrate
on conditions in the vicinity of magnetospheric boundary layers,
particularly the magnetopause. This data analysis scheme is an analog
for one data analysis function of the High Performance Computing
Subsystem (HPCS) which is being planned for MMS.  Using MMS/HPCS,
plasma moments will be calculated every few seconds along MMS's entire
orbit, which is a dramatic enhancement over current MMS capability.