The SPINE community is an open, peaceful and non-profits scientific and industrial community, dedicated to the study and the modelling of the interactions between space plasma and space systems, including spacecraft, payloads, scientific instruments, natural space objects.
Spacecraft-plasma interactions include:
- spacecraft charging, in surface (i.e. surface charging)
- the computation of the electrostatic sheath structures and plasma wakes
- internal charging induced by ionising higher energies particles. .
One of the initial needs of such modelling capabilities was as well the characterisation of plasma instruments and the understanding of in-flight results. The modelling effort and developed tools also includes the modelling of the impact of artificial or generated plasmas, like thrusters plumes or ions guns, on such space structures. They have been recently extended to dusty plasmas for the modelling of the Lunar and asteroids environments
The aims of the SPINE community are to gather and share these expertise, tools, feedbacks and data related to these fields of physics and build-up a critical mass of expertise and knowledge in EU.
In this frame, the SPINE community offers the present collaborative platform gathering:
- collaborative tools (e.g. forums)
- reference documents,
- modelling software,
- a dedicated software forge, to support the development of simulation tools.
Part of the Website is available in reading as guest (i.e. without registration nor login) but some other parts and the access to hosted data require to be registered as SPINE member beforehand.
Some subparts of the Website are reserved to subgroups of SPINE’s members and/or their access might be limited or related to specific subprojects and available to their teams or sub-communities only.
The SPINE community and the Website is managed and moderated by the Software Decision and Advisory Board (SDAB), constituted of representing of the founding members.
The SPINE community is located in European Union (EU) and mainly involving members issued from ESA member countries but remaining open to all members issued from all countries. However, some sub-projects or tools may have geographical and/or application fields restrictions.