helioforecast / heliosat

A simple python package for handling and processing heliospheric satellite data.

HelioSat

A simple and small python package for handling and processing heliospheric satellite data. The current primary features are automatic data downloading & crude processing for DSCOVR, MES, PSP, STA, STB, VEX and WIND (plus BEPI and SOLO once data products are publicly available). Furthermore all related and required SPICE kernels are downloaded automatically.

Installation

Install the latest version manually using git:

git clone https://github.com/ajefweiss/HelioSat
cd HelioSat
pip install .

or slightly older versions from PyPi with pip install HelioSat.

Basic Usage

Import the heliosat module and create a satellite instance:

import heliosat

wind_sat = heliosat.WIND()

This will automatically download and load any required SPICE kernels (using spiceypy). Note that kernel or data files will be stored in ~/.heliosat by default. As this may use up alot of disk space you can alternatively change the default path by setting the environment variable HELIOSAT_DATAPATH.

Querying data (any tz-unaware datetime objects are assumed to be UTC) can then be done using:

t_query = ["2020-01-01T00:00:00"]
dt_r, dk_r = wind_sat.get(t_query, "mfi_h0", frame="GSE", return_datetimes=True)

By default only values at times given in t_query are returned, if you need a time range you can either manually generate an extensive list of dates or use:

t_query = ["2020-01-01T00:00:00", "2020-01-02T00:00:00"]
dt_r, dk_r = wind_sat.get(t_query, "mfi_h0", as_endpoints=True, frame="GSE", return_datetimes=True)