WASHINGTON — 4 federal agencies have signed an agreement intended to enhance cooperation on space weather research and translating that research into operations.
Representatives of NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Science Foundation and the U.S. Air Force signed a memorandum of agreement on the White House Dec. 7 outlining how they may work together on space weather research and operations.
The goal of the agreement is to enhance coordination on transitioning space weather research into operational forecasts in addition to providing feedback from those operational applications into research. That’s collectively often called research-to-operations-to-research, or R2O2R.
The agreement, agencies said, will allow NASA, NOAA, NSF and the Air Force to raised coordinate R2O2R activities, resembling moving space weather models and forecasts developed by researchers to operations and coordinating feedback from users of those models and forecasts.
“We have now a shared goal and that’s to boost our nation’s space weather preparedness,” Ken Graham, director of the National Weather Service inside NOAA, in an announcement. “That may only occur through higher coordination and expanding on existing efforts to enhance space weather observations, research and modeling.”
The agreement builds upon a document released by the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) in March 2022 that established an R2O2R framework to coordinate advancing research efforts at those agencies into space weather operations and giving requirements from operational uses of space weather products to researchers. That document specifically called for the 4 agencies to develop a brand new agreement to collaborate on those activities.
A report earlier this yr by the Space Weather Advisory Group specifically called on NOAA to enhance its R2O2R activities. It noted there had been “substantial progress” in implementing that framework but said NOAA could do more to handle challenges like creating “operations-ready” research data and improving the maturity of models.
Space weather is taking over increasing prominence at NOAA. In a presentation at the autumn meeting of the National Academies’ Committee on Earth Sciences and Applications from Space Nov. 29, Steve Volz, director of NOAA’s Satellite and Information Service, described how the agency was establishing an area weather office to coordinate those activities.
That features flying the Compact Coronagraph space weather instrument on the GOES-U weather satellite, scheduled for launch next April, and the Space Weather Follow-On (SWFO) mission, slated to launch in early 2025 to operate on the sun-Earth L-1 Lagrange point.
He said on the meeting that NOAA is starting planning for 2 successors to SWFO, currently often called L-1 A and B, that may launch in 2029 and 2032. Having two spacecraft, he said, is crucial to make sure no gap in service should one satellite malfunction, a priority given the present reliance on spacecraft which have far exceeded their design life.
“We wish to get from a one-failure to a two-failures-to-a-gap situation for space weather, which now we have never had,” he said, “so we’d have an operational and a spare mission at L-1 for the critical solar measurements.”
“We wish to get to a resilient posture, and that’s going to take one other 10 years to get there,” he acknowledged, “but that’s the plan now we have in place.”