The SAMPEX Data Center and User Interface for the Heliophysics Community

The Solar, Anomalous, Magnetospheric Particle Explorer (SAMPEX) was the first of NASA's Small Explorer (SMEX) series. SAMPEX was launched July 3, 1992 into a 520 by 670 km orbit at 82 degrees inclination. SAMPEX carries four instruments designed to study energetic particles of solar, interplanetary, and magnetospheric origin, as well as "anomalous" and galactic cosmic rays. As an outcome of the Senior Review process, the NASA SAMPEX science mission ended on June 30, 2004, leaving a 12-year continuous record of observations. (The spacecraft and instruments are still operating and returning science data under a partnership between NASA and the Aerospace Corporation). SAMPEX was launched before the development of the WWW and implementation of NASA's open data policy. This, and the complexity of the data analysis have made it difficult for the general community to make full use of the SAMPEX science data set. The SAMPEX Data Center remedies the situation. The data center set-up and operation was funded for 3 years by NASA, and it remains in operation. The goals of the data center are to enable community access to the full SAMPEX data set by developing an up-to-date, flexible web-based system, and to provide for the eventual permanent archiving of this version of the SAMPEX data set at the NSSDC. Knowledgeable members of the SAMPEX science team have prepared the data, and members of the ACE Science Center at Caltech are involved in maintaining the data distribution pipeline and user interface. The system is modeled in part on the ACE Science Center, but enhanced to accommodate the more-complex SAMPEX data set. We will describe the current status of the SAMPEX Data Center, the user interface, and the contents of the data that are available.