Europan Space Agency takes the Grid seriouslyBrussels 23 March 2001 One of the 'traditional' Grid applications - is the Grid already mature enough to talk of traditional and new applications? - is space technology. As Luigi Fusci from the European Space Agency (ESA) explained at the Grid workshop organised by the European Commission in Brussels in March 2001, his organisation is actively involved in the demonstration of Grid technologies for different space applications. ESA is, for instance, partner in the DataGrid project. This is an example of a project that develops the Grid infrastructure in the space research and application domain.
The organisation is also preparing an organisation wide Virtual Archive and is developing technologies for data analysis and manipulation, data fusion and data mining compatible with Grid environments. Also dedicated test-bed infrastructures in ESRIN and ESTEC for the proposed multi-disciplinary applications are being developed.
In space research, the main Grid drive comes from the massive computing requirements needed over the next decade in particle interaction, modelling and simulation activities. ESA intents to develop three main test-beds in: Monte Carlo energetic particle interaction problems; Spacecraft Plasma interaction modelling in 3-D and Sun-to-Earth surface space weather simulation.
The test-bed in the Solar System Research Infrastructure, will look at online data access; manipulation and analysis of these data using distributed multi-mission data archives. Also support for data analysis for instance by using techniques as imaging, magnetospheric plasma, and exploring geo-physical, geo-chemical, and atmospheric data, can be part of the research. The project will explore prototyping of distributed collaborative analysis environment.
According to Luigi Fusco, "in general new architectures, offered by the use of the Grid concept, will be considered, analysing scenarios for the possible solutions, outline the limits of available middleware packages when employed in future ground segments to future Earth Observation ground segments, space science and engineering."
Grid techniques will also be employed to provide public and educational access to Grid components or results. "The general public and educational users will have excellent visibility of important Space Research and the ability to contribute to it", Fuso concludes in his position paper.
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