DREAM Integration of Space Weather Forecasts into Space Protection

How would the US respond to a clandestine attack that disabled one of our satellites? How would we know that it was an attack, not a natural failure? The goal of space weather programs as applied to space protection is to provide a rapid and reliable assessment of the probability that satellite or system failure was caused by the space environment. The objective is straight-forward achieving it is not. However, great strides are being made on a number of fronts. We will report on recent advances in providing rapid, automated anomaly/attack assessment for the penetrating radiation environment in the Earth’s radiation belts. We have previously reported on the Dynamic Radiation Environment Assimilation Model (DREAM) that was developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory to assess hazards posed by the natural and by nuclear radiation belts. Here, we report on recent developments that are moving this program from the research, test, and evaluation phases to real-time implementation and application. We discuss the challenges of leveraging space environment data sets for applications that are beyond the scope of mission requirements, the challenges of moving data from where they exist to where they are needed, the challenges of turning data into actionable information, and how those challenges are being overcome. We discuss the state-ofthe-art as it exists in 2012 including the new capabilities that have been enabled and the limitations that still exist. We will also discuss a potentially transformative new space weather data resource NASA’s Radiation Belt Storm Probes mission (RBSP).