HSO Connect: Creating User-driven Infrastructure for Space Science

The NASA Heliophysics System Observatory (HSO Connect) project is an initiative to gain the most utility from data available for space physics. The HSO Connect community comprises GSFC/NASA, NCAR's Whole Heliosphere and Planetary Interactions (WHPI) program and the Parker Solar Probe (PSP) project team at APL (Applied Physics Lab).

The purpose of HSO Connect is to unify the community and provide observations coordinated around the PSP mission and other high profile Heliophysics projects requiring unique integration. We share the HSO Connect approach to curating and providing resources critical to discovery, including observational data, related data products, and basic tools to analyze the observations as well as providing the same access to models and simulations which explain the data.

To support an interoperable and reusable data system to last beyond the HSO Connect lifetime, we have worked with the community of end users to identify, from their perspective, the most impactful "questions" which they want HSO Connect to answer for them (for example, "Where the data associated with phenomenon "X" might be stored and accessible?"). We have utilized this feedback to prioritize how to better combine existing capabilities and to identify which infrastructure capabilities need to be augmented or created. We will show how we have utilized the community feedback to determine both impact and ease of implementation, used this information to derive critical requirements for HSO Connect and used this information to align existing capabilities and create missing infrastructure within resourcing limits.