Solar Orbiter Energetic Particle Detector: Early Results and Science Data Center

The Energetic Particle Detector (EPD) onboard Solar Orbiter is a suite of multiple sensors (Suprathermal Electrons Protons, STEP; Suprathermal Ion Spectrograph, SIS; Electron Proton Telescope, EPT; High Energy Telescope, HET), which measures particle intensities over a wide range of energies (from suprathermal to relativistic energies) and for different species (electron, protons, and heavy ions) in different directions. The EPD data center (http://espada.uah.es/epd) offers a primer venue to

inspect the Solar Energetic Particle (SEP) activity, both to promptly check the most recent solar activity using quicklook plots based on low-latency data sets, and to perform deeper studies with data validated for scientific use. Among others, a series of plots and relevant information, such as the spacecraft maneuvers or sensor updates, are provided to the community. This facility gives access to all the data from the EPD sensors (which can be also found in the Solar Orbiter Archive), including Level 2 (calibrated) as well as more elaborated Level 3 data in the near future, which have further processing. An application programming interface (API) is also offered for accessing EPD data. Besides, during the first year and a half of observations, Solar Orbiter has completed three orbits, and EPD has measured several increases in particle fluxes, due to heliospheric and solar-origin events. Some of the events have been analysed and the flux enhancements have been tagged for future studies. This work aims to let the community know the availability of the instrument data products, and to explain how to properly use the provided data products and plots, as well as to summarise all the available studies published until now. The EPD onboard Solar Orbiter is a suite of multiple sensors (STEP, SIS, EPT, HET), which measure particle intensities over a wide range of energies (from suprathermal to relativistic energies) and for different species (e -, protons, and heavy ions) in different directions. The EPD data center (http://espada.uah.es/epd) offers a prime venue to inspect the SEP activity, both to promptly check the most recent solar activity using quicklook plots based on low-latency data sets, and to perform deeper studies with data validated for scientific use. Among others, a series of plots and relevant information, such as the spacecraft maneuvers or sensor updates, are provided to the community. This facility gives access to all the data from the EPD sensors (also located in SOAr), including L2 and more elaborated L3 data in the near future, which have further processing. An application programming interface is also offered for accessing EPD data. Besides, during the first year and a half of observations, Solar Orbiter has completed three orbits, and EPD has measured several increases in particle fluxes, due to heliospheric and solar-origin events. Some of the events have been analysed and the flux enhancements have been tagged for future studies. This work aims to let the community know the availability of the instrument data products, and to explain how to properly use the provided data products and plots, as well as to summarise all the available studies published until now.
A list of electron and proton (ion) increases observed by EPD, showing at least a factor of 2 enhancements above the pre-event background is presented below.
This catalogue extends over two mission phases: commissioning and cruise. For the former, Solar Orbiter data is not fully publicly available as it was intended mainly for commissioning, during which the instrumental settings were changed multiple times Abstract 1. University of Alcalá 2. Christian-Albrechts Universität 3. Johns Hopkins University, APL 4. National Observatory of Athens, IAASARS 5. Universitat de Barcelona 6. University of Turku 7. NASA/GSFC 8. Catholic University of America 9. Paradox Cat GmbH 10. German Aerospace Center (DLR)

Catalogue of Particle Enhacements
It can be found at the main EPD website (http://espada.uah.es) under DATA>EPD Data Portal. It contains the full set of published EPD data products at the SOAr (http://soar.esac.esa.int) in the form of daily CDF files. EPD data are published at most 3 months after they are received on ground.
Data files are organised by their processing: -Level 1 -received from EPD in uncalibrated units (i.e. detector counts).
-Level 2 -main science product. Calibrated in physical units and validated by the EPD team.

Application Programming Interface (API)
The website also offers a basic API for programmatic access to the EPD data. It allows to search for specific products and dates, e.g.: http://espada.uah.es/epd/data/api/search?level=l2&product=ept-rates&from=2021-06-01&to=2021-06-30 will return a list of files for the ept-rates product for June 2021. A given file in the list can be then downloaded as The first year of energetic particle measurements in the inner heliosphere with Solar Orbiter's EPD

Quicklook plots
Automatically produced using low latency data. These data are sent to ground with the highest priority for monitoring purposes, but have lower quality than the final data products, that may arrive with long delays (up to several months).
4-day and monthly SIS browse plots are also provided showing higher quality data specific to the SIS instrument.  EPT intensities of 124 -218 keV for ions and 54 -101 keV for e -.