Did NOAA provide any funding for the ACE RTSW ground system put together by SEC and how does the RTSW ground system work?
No, NOAA did not provide actual dollars. We developed the ground system under the concept of a partnership, with each partner providing some contribution to the overall system. CRL in Japan provided the ground system and all the local staff at no cost to NOAA. In return for tracking ACE RTSW data in real time-the data is sent to CRL the second it is finished being processed. RAL in England is another story. They provided the ground system but we needed to pay for someone to keep it running. The USAF stepped up to this task, as part of their contribution to the program, and send us enough money each year to fund one person at RAL. So RAL is providing a lot for very little. These two stations are 100 % dedicated to tracking ACE. During the Summer they can provide nearly 23 hours of coverage, but during the Winter they can only provide about 15 hours of coverage. NASA downloads the science data once per day over a period of nearly 3.5 hours. During the download they send us the RTSW data
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- Did NOAA provide any funding for the ACE RTSW ground system put together by SWPC and how does the RTSW ground system work?
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