The NSF INSPIRE Program for Comparative Ionospheric Science---Earth, Solar System, Exoplanets

Abstract:

Discipline barriers at funding agencies can often arise from a programmatic structure that evolved from discovery mode science in earlier eras to the highly focused agendas of current times. Such discipline and funding barriers tend to hinder coordinated studies of topics that should be unified. To address this issue, The NSF established the “Integrated NSF Support Promoting Interdisciplinary Research and Education (INSPIRE)” program specifically to remove such barriers to forefront research. The Boston University INSPIRE program deals with a region of atmospheric science (“Ionospheric Physics”) that is compartmentalized at Earth as Geoscience, called Planetary Science for bodies in our solar system, and referred to as exo-planet atmospheres in Astrophysics. These fields have different meetings linked to different professional societies (e.g., CEDAR/AGU, DPS, AAS), and publish in different journals (e.g., JGR, Icarus, Ap. J.)

The aim of the BU INSPIRE project is to bridge the gaps that separate scientific communities studying ionospheres throughout the solar system and galaxy. While the same basic physical and chemical processes are responsible for ionospheric behavior in all planetary domains, there is a lack of cross-fertilization that impedes progress. INSPIRE addressed the need to treat fundamental atmospheric and space plasma processes as universal—rather than as unique, planet-by-planet, phenomena.

Three major activities are underway: (1) The first comprehensive archive to host all of the observations and related parameters necessary to conduct comparative studies of ionospheres throughout the solar system and beyond; (2) host interactive versions of 1-dimensional ionospheric models that can be applied to solar system planets and exoplanets; (3) comparative studies of solar system ionospheres using all possible planetary observations in conjunction with ‘same-day” observations of the terrestrial ionosphere.