SEDAT

Presented by Mike Hapgood

Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Chilton, Didcot,
Oxfordshire, OX11 0QX, UK.
Tel: +44 1235 44 6520, Fax: +44 1235 44 5848,
Email: M.Hapgood@rl.ac.uk
 

Mike Hapgood spoke about the SEDAT (Space Environment Database and Analysis Tools) system, which is being developed by Rutherford Appleton Laboratory under contract to ESA. The aim of this project is to develop a new approach to the engineering analysis of the spacecraft charged-particle environment. One part of SEDAT will be a database containing a large and comprehensive set of data about that environment as measured in-situ by various missions; thus the user will be able to select a set of space environment data appropriate to the engineering problem under study. The other part of SEDAT will be software tools that can operate on these data to carry out a wide range of engineering analyses. An important aspect of SEDAT is that these two parts must be seamless integrated so that the tools can be applied within queries, i.e. the user can construct queries that operate on the values of engineering functions derived from database parameters (and not just on the values of database parameters).

This approach differs from traditional space environment engineering studies. In the latter the space environment is characterised by a model that is a synthesis of previous observations. However, in SEDAT the environment is characterised directly by the observations. This approach offers several advantages to the engineering analyst:

1. The data used in the study can be tailored more precisely to the engineering problem under study. The analysis is not constrained by selection effects within the model used.
2. Similarly the analyst may tailor the processing of the data to the problem under study. The analysis is not constrained by binning or other processing effects that were used to generate the model.
3. New data are readily incorporated in the database and thus made available for engineering analyses. The traditional approach would require the production, validation and dissemination of an updated model, which is a far more time-consuming activity.

For more information see the SEDAT web pages on  http://www.wdc.rl.ac.uk/sedat/.

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