Solar wind with Hydrogen Ion charge Exchange and Large-Scale Dynamics (SHIELD) DRIVE Science Center

The heliosphere is an immense shield that protects the solar system from harsh, galactic radiation. Knowledge gaps include the basic shape of the heliosphere, the structure and extent of its tail, the flow pattern and the width of the heliosheath, and the extent of the heliosphere's influence on the local interstellar medium. Current global models fail to explain major observations. Models do not integrate the influences of suprathermal particles, reconnection, turbulence phenomena, and other microprocesses. The next quantum leap in understanding the heliosphere will be realized by synthesizing knowledge in theory, modeling, and observations to create a comprehensive, self-consistent global model that connects all the physical processes that effect the heliosphere. Solar wind with Hydrogen Ion charge Exchange and Large-Scale Dynamics (SHIELD) DRIVE Science Center is a new NASA DRIVE center with the aim to understand the nature and structure of the heliosphere. The key deliverable is a comprehensive, self consistent, global model of the heliosphere that explains data from all relevant in situ and remote observations and predicts the radiation environment. To realize our vision and create a new model for the heliosphere, SHIELD will enlist experts on observations, kinetic physics and MHD physics, and high energy particle transport and acceleration physics. In this talk I will describe the ongoing current knowledge gaps and the progresses made in SHIELD in Phase I as well as the implications for what is needed to close some of the questions. Some examples are that SHIELD a) showed that ENA spectra derived by modeling the ion spectrum downstream of the TS with kinetic models show an energy gap that is time dependent (Gkioulidou et al. 2022); b) showed the confinement of the heliosheath plasma by the solar magnetic field (Kornbleuth et a. 2021); c) discovered a Rayleigh-Taylor-like instability in the HS, driven by the neutral H atoms, that may cause the heliospheric tail to open (Opher et al. 2021); d) showed that magnetic flux conservation implies CG flows are incorrect (Richardson et al. 2021). I will describe the implications of these advances for our understanding of the heliosphere and the remaining open questions.