Welcome to the new version of CaltechAUTHORS. Login is currently restricted to library staff. If you notice any issues, please email coda@library.caltech.edu
Published April 17, 2024 | in press
Journal Article Open

Particle radiation environment in the heliosphere: Status, limitations, and recommendations

Abstract

Space weather is a multidisciplinary research area connecting scientists from across heliophysics domains seeking a coherent understanding of our space environment that can also serve modern life and society’s needs. COSPAR’s ISWAT (International Space Weather Action Teams) “clusters” focus attention on different areas of space weather study while ensuring the coupled system is broadly addressed via regular communications and interactions. The ISWAT H3 cluster “Radiation environment in heliosphere” (https://www.iswat-cospar.org/h3) has been working to provide a scientific platform to understand, characterize, and predict the energetic particle radiation in the heliosphere with the practical goal of mitigating radiation risks associated with areospace activities, the satellite industry, and human space explorations. In particular, present approaches help us understand the physical phenomena at large, optimizing the output of multiviewpoint observations and pushing current models to their limits. In this article, we review the scientific aspects of the radiation environment in the heliosphere, covering four different radiation types: solar energetic particles, ground-level enhancement (a type of solar energetic particle event with energies high enough to trigger signals in ground-level detectors), galactic cosmic rays, and anomalous cosmic rays. We focus on related advances in the research community in the past 10–20 years and what we still lack in terms of understanding and predictive capabilities. Finally, we also consider some recommendations related to the improvement of both observational and modeling capabilities in the field of the space radiation environment.

Copyright and License

© 2024 COSPAR. Published by Elsevier Under a Creative Commons license.

Acknowledgement

We thank the four anonymous referees for their time and effort in reviewing this article. We acknowledge the COSPAR ISWAT community and their effort in organizing this special activity, in particular the dedicated endeavor of Masha Kuznetsova and Mario Bisi. J.G. is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grants 42188101, 42074222, 42130204) and the Strategic Priority Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (grant XDB41000000). B.W. was supported in part by a US National Science Foundation EPSCoR RII-Track-1 Cooperative Agreement (OIA-2148653). C.C. is supported by NASA grants NNN06AA01C, 80NSSC18K1446, 80NSSC18K0223, and JHU.APL173063. S.D. acknowledges support from the UK Natural Environment Research Council (grant NE/V002864/1) and the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council (grant ST/V000934/1). M.D. acknowledges support from the Croatian Science Foundation under the project IP-2020–02-9893 (ICOHOSS). L.W. is supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under contracts 42225404, 42127803, and 42150105. H.M.B. conducted this work while supported by Cooperative Agreement award NA17OAR4320101. The Integrated Solar Energetic Proton Alert/Warning System project transitioning SEP models to real-time operations and the development of the SEP Scoreboard is supported by the Advanced Exploration Systems Division under the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate of NASA and is performed in support of the Human Health and Performance Contract for NASA (NNJ15HK11B). Part of the research described in this article was performed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with NASA (80NM0018D0004).

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Files

1-s2.0-S0273117724003053-main.pdf
Files (7.9 MB)
Name Size Download all
md5:ca33cd6106e02800422afc1e01b65100
7.9 MB Preview Download

Additional details

Created:
May 30, 2024
Modified:
May 30, 2024