“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.
