Active Magnetosphere and Planetary Electrodynamics Response Experiment – website status?

Robin, Haje,

I am looking at global sensor networks, and got to magnetotelluric arrays.  For background I was reading about natural signals that can be used for calibration and reference and came to http://ampere.jhuapl.edu/index.html

To be explicit, I was at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birkeland_current and clicked on the link to Project Ampere that took me to https://web.archive.org/web/20050211120508/http://dysprosium.jhuapl.edu/  Then a search for JHU/APL Global Birkeland Currents Data Product System.  A stop at https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-26732-2_7 where there was a link to http://ampere.jhuapl.edu/

I can mostly understand the data.  The current maps and movies really helped me to understand the variations. I wanted years long movies and some overall statistical summaries and explanations, some links to other networks.

The registration kind of flaked out, but eventually seemed to work.  It gave error messages, but went ahead.

I could not get from http://ampere.jhuapl.edu/index.html to https://www.iridiumnext.com/ with a stop at “not secure” because of http, it took me to https://www.iridiummuseum.com/

“Iridium’s Next Step at https://www.iridiummuseum.com/exhibits/iridiums-next-step/ is  bit confusing.  It said that in 2019 Iridium activated the second generation satellites. But I could not find more recent data.

Elon Musk is shown.  Are any of his satellites offering data?  He can move so much into space, a few kilos for public data collection would be nice.  I have been tracking all the astronomical groups on earth and there are a lot of cities in the world that can’t see the sky.  I was joking that Elon Musk (Iridium too?) ought to put decent all sky cameras on every satellite – point them out into space and beam that data as live all sky internet for every person on earth.  About 86% of people in the US live in large cities, and half world wide.  One decent camera for everu large city live on the internet with basic overlays and tools could teach the 1.92 Billion first time learners in the world (5-20 years old) and give a perfectly clear night sky to every person on earth from their location – or nearby.  Hubble was a complete failure in that regard. They put out lossy formats for a long time (NASA still does mostly, though I  have been bugging them for a few years).  Not a single permanent all sky camera in the world now – publicly available, archives of lossless data, integrated with all deeper surveys.  It is easy for me to see – but getting people to work together is as hard as herding termites.

I was looking at stations in the IRIS.edu _US-MT (magnetotelluric) array yesterday and the last few days.  https://ds.iris.edu/ds/nodes/dmc/earthscope/usarray/_US-MT/

Most of the fluctuations might be connected to your data, but it is not obvious to me yet.  Those strong changes in the currents should show up, but the geometry is a bit messy without a guide.

The reason I have been tracking global sensor networks, is there are many new ones where groups realize they are working on a global topic (global climate change, comets, ionosphere, cosmic rays, software defined radio (many applications), surface astronomical observing, astronomy education, etc etc etc) but have not learned how to set up and organize efficient global networks.  Being on the Internet and connected globally is trivial. What they all fail at is organization, clarity, support for community, curation, accountability, and “between group sharing and cooperation”. The best picture I can give you of what it looks like (I have been doing this every day for the last 23 years) is a termite mound.  Every one is working on their own with no central coordination.  Sometimes a few will work immediately together, or implicitly on a tunnel where they are all constrained to be in the same place, or implicitly on a task like moving a dead animal where coordination is measured by effect. That is kind of crude, but every day I see groups of tens of thousands or hundreds of millions all duplicating something, all reinventing the same things millions of times.  All forced to memorize sequences of things to do pieces of a larger thing.

“covid” OR “coronavirus” OR “corona virus” has 7.71 Billion entry points today.  It has been at 7.5 B for many months. That is massive duplication of a few ten thousand basic facts in different languages.  All the research is completely blocked by everyone still using paper methods — and not working together globally.

I won’t bore you with my problems.  I keep working at things, but see “global climate change”, “geophysical data”, “nuclear data”, wikipedia equations and data (they are all in text and images, not useful or functional).  I get a few groups to change now and then.

I am not going to ask you to change anything. Just saying hello, thanks for the data you did put online.

Richard Collins, Director, The Internet Foundation