NSSDC Alumnus, Joe King, Stays NASA-Involved

By Natalia Papitashvili, Code 633

Five weeks after his January retirement from NASA, NSSDC's former Head, Dr. Joseph King, started work with a local contractor, QSS Group, Inc.  He splits his time between support for Goddard's Living With a Star (LWS) Program Office and development of the OMNI-2 near-Earth heliospheric data set.

For LWS, he supports a systems engineering task oriented towards defining and implementing parts of an LWS data environment.  The core elements of this environment will be capabilities defined and built by individual LWS missions (e.g., Solar Dynamics Observatory), while the "program level" additions will provide needed supplementary capabilities and integrations across these mission-specific facilities.

OMNI-2 will be a new version of the multi-source OMNI data set first assembled by Joe in the mid-1970's.  The new version will have hourly averaged magnetic field and plasma data from the nearby solar wind, energetic particle fluxes and solar and geomagnetic activity indices.

New parameters will include alpha particle to proton density ratios, AE (auroral electrojet) geomagnetic indices, and several NSSDC-computed parameters: electric field (Ey, gsm), solar wind pressure, and Alfven Mach number.

New approaches to time-shifting data from "distant" spacecraft (ISEE 3, Wind, ACE) to Earth will be used.  A new proton density normalization will be used to yield flow pressures more likely to be absolutely correct.

This author continues to work with Joe in the evolution of OMNI-2.