Our Funders

The UCalgary Space Remote Sensing Open Science Platform is made possible through the support of several funding agencies. Their investments enable this platform to exist and serve the international science community, supporting all aspects: development and operation of our ground-based instrument networks, data and server infrastructure, web visualizations, software tools, and more.

Canada Foundation for Innovation, Province of Alberta

The Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) provides major capital infrastructure funding that has enabled the design and deployment of new instrument networks. CFI-funded projects include:

• NORSTAR - The Northern Solar Terrestrial Array, a foundational network of all-sky cameras, meridian scanning photometers, and riometers deployed across Northern Canada for capturing observations of the aurora
• RISR-C + REGO - The Resolute Bay Incoherent Scatter Radar Canada, and the Redline Emission Geospace Observatory, a network of 10 redline all-sky imagers across the Canadian North
• TREx - The Transition Region Explorer, deploying multispectral and spectrographic imagers, imaging riometers, and GNSS receivers across Canada
• AuroraX - A cyberinfrastructure platform for data discovery, analysis, and visualization of auroral science data
• SWAN - The Space Weather Adaptive Network, deploying hyper-spectral riometers for real-time space weather monitoring across Canada
• GDC-G - Canada Foundation for Innovation funding to develop and deploy new ground-based systems that complement the NASA GDC mission

CFI delivers funding through matching programs, typically providing roughly 40% of the cost of infrastructure. These funds have been matched in equal part by the Province of Alberta. Additional matching has come from other Canadian and International agencies and industry.

Canadian Space Agency

The Canadian Space Agency is our primary funder of instrument operations and data distribution for the platform, in addition to funding the deployment of the THEMIS ASI array and building the new SMILE ASI array. CSA funding supports:

• THEMIS ASI - Deployment of the THEMIS All-Sky Imager array, a network of 20+ cameras
• SMILE ASI - The SMILE All-Sky Imager array, a network of 20+ cameras which replace THEMIS ASI with modern full-colour imagery
• Operation of THEMIS ASI, REGO, TREx, SWAN, and other previous ground-based instrument arrays
• Data archiving, processing, and distribution infrastructure
• Development of science applications and tools
• Maintenance and servicing of field instrumentation

Canadian Space Agency has also provided funding to support research and training through a number of competitive programs. Importantly, almost everything that we do builds on the Canadian Space Agency's CANOPUS project, which between 1989-2002, established the world's foremost heterogeneous array of ground-based sensors.

European Space Agency / Technical University of Denmark

The collaboration with ESA and DTU supports the SRS's involvement in the Swarm satellite mission. This includes:

• The initial development of the Swarm-Aurora visualization platform, which links ground-based auroral observations with Swarm satellite data
• A portion of the funding to develop the AuroraX platform, and advanced Swarm-Aurora integrations

Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC)

NSERC provides research funding through several programs that support the people and tools behind the platform:

• Discovery grants supporting ongoing research programs in space physics
• Funding for graduate students who contribute to the science output, development, and operations involving SRS instrumentation