March 3, 2010, 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm

March 3, 2010, 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm

The Helioviewer Project, or how to enable discovery and exploration in the SDO era for everyone everywhere.

Jack Ireland (GSFC/ADNET)

There is an ever increasing amount of solar and heliospheric data gathered by multiple facilities such as space-based and ground-based observatories; for example, the recently launched Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) will shortly send us more than 1TB/day of science data. In addition, there are also multiple feature and event catalogs arising from human and computer based detection methods. The Helioviewer Project is developing a versatile discovery infrastructure to allow users around the world to visualize, browse and access these heterogeneous datasets in an intuitive and highly customizable fashion. Helioviewer Project tools are based around the JPEG2000 file format, an extremely flexible format that allows for the efficient transfer of images (and meta-data, such as FITS keywords) between client and server. This dramatically reduces the number of bytes transferred, making possible responsive and flexible scientific discovery applications that can browse populous archives of large images. In this talk I will begin by reviewing current tools for viewing solar images over the web, and demonstrate the need for the Helioviewer Project to deal with the approaching flood of solar data. After a short introduction to JPEG200, I will briefly describe the current status of the Helioviewer Project with respect to (1) instrument image support (2) our visualization tools JHelioviewer (www.jhelioviewer.org) and Helioviewer.org, and (3) our interaction with other facilities such as the Virtual Solar Observatory. The Helioviewer Project is funded by ESA and NASA. JHelioviewer is being developed by ESA, and Helioviewer.org is being developed by ADNET Systems Inc. for NASA and ESA.