Welcome

Welcome to the Virtual Ionosphere Thermosphere Mesosphere Observatory. Click on button below to initiate a query of space science resources.

"Virtual Observatories" provide scientists with integrated access to distributed and diverse scientific data holdings, models and tools. These systems are specifically intended to allow particular regions of space and the near Earth environment to be studied more completely as systems. There are four primary tasks that individual mission datacenters perform. They

1. describe their data holdings and resources
2. discover what data sets are available for solving the user's particular science problem
3. provide a means to access this data or resource, and
4. provide tools to help personnel use the data that they have found

The organization of the Sun-Earth Connections VxOs into domains (solar, heliosphere, magnetosphere, and upper atmosphere) is, in part, recognition of the unique character of each domain. Each of these domains encompasses unique physical processes and regimes with distinct qualifying data.

The Virtual Observatory for the Ionosphere-Thermosphere-Mesosphere Community (VITMO) is being implemented at JHU/APL and provides data covering the Ionosphere Thermosphere Mesosphere (ITM). The ITM region is observed by ground based remote sensing instruments, satellite based remote sensing instruments, and in-situ satellite instruments. In addition, there are external drivers in solar radiation and the solar wind and magnetospheric particle inputs. A Virtual Observatory that covers the ITM region needs to deal with the large diversity of data types in the study of this region.

The VITMO project is under development by The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in collaboration with NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Hampton University, University of Michigan, University of Texas at Dallas, and High Altitude Observatory/National Center for Atmospheric Research to provide integrated access to a wide variety of space and ground based ITM science services such as data, services, tools and models.

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