Solar Orbiter in the HelioPhysics Archive: A New Way for Scientists to Discover Heliophysics Data
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: The European Space Agency’s Science Data Centre (ESDC) offers open access to science data from ESA missions through platforms that support long-term preservation and scientific reusability. Within this framework, the HelioPhysics Archive (HPA) is evolving into a scalable, multi-mission platform for solar and heliophysics data. Recent developments of the HPA platform include the Field of View (FoV) tool released early April 2025, and the newly introduced SOAR TreeView, to meet specific requirements from the Solar Orbiter mission. The FoV tool provides a way to visualize the FoV of the Solar Orbiter EUI/HRI, PHI/HRT, and SPICE instruments as seen both from Solar Orbiter and from Earth perspectives using SunPy, while the HPA TreeView, a tree-based data discovery interface, is designed to improve data exploration and contextual understanding of large search results. In SOAR, queries can return millions of files from a single search, with the results historically presented as a flat list of files. While this is useful for metadata inspection, this format lacks a high-level overview, which can make it difficult for scientists to gain an overall understanding of the available data. The HPA TreeView solves this by grouping results into structured hierarchies based on instrument, experiment, and major sensor or telescope. This allows scientists to assess the distribution and relevance of the data more easily. The TreeView is the default view for Solar Orbiter in the HPA, with the list-based view still available for more detailed inspection. Developed in consultation with users, the TreeView introduces a new service that uses our existing TAP ADQL queries to generate a hierarchical JSON representation of search results. Combined with the FoV tool, these enhancements improve the discoverability and usability of SOAR data. This in turn helps position HPA as a foundation for long-term scientific data preservation, with the ultimate objective of enhancing the scientific value of heliophysics archives.
Authors: Masselos, Laura, Cruz, Mikel
Language: English
Subfield: Astronomy and Astrophysics
Field: Physics and Astronomy
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7092300422
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