SPEARHEAD

Through a detailed analysis of very high-energy particle observations from the most important heliophysics missions combined with ground based measurements, SPEARHEAD will provide answers to three science questions: 1) How are protons accelerated beyond 100 MeV and electrons beyond 1 MeV in solar eruptions? 2) What are the release times and spectral characteristics of near-relativistic particles from solar eruptions? 3) How do coronal and interplanetary structures affect the transport processes of very high energetic particles? To enable the scientific data analysis SPEARHEAD has three technical objectives: 1) Determining the response functions of a large number of spacecraft instruments to derive high-energy particle fluxes from observations at unprecedented accuracy releasing revised and completely new datasets 2) Performing cross-calibration of datasets measured by science-grade and monitoring instruments to enable the use of monitoring data for scientific analyses 3) Combining high-energy particle and context observations together with modeling of plasma structures for easier in-depth analysis of solar eruptions, quantifying their effect and delivering them to the community. SPEARHEAD combines eight partners possessing the best European resources (in terms of data, models and infrastructure) in very high-energy particle research into a consortium that will deliver answers to the three science questions and consolidated datasets, methodology and open access tools to the community enabling breakthrough science on these open problems. The work is organized efficiently in 8 work packages with carefully picked top European expertise in each of them. SPEARHEAD will also facilitate the future application of its results through dedicated and comprehensive user engagement, direct provision through open access infrastructures as ESA datalabs, while strongly promotes its results and the value-added datasets and tools for the future heliophysics missions.

2024

2026