The Auroral Planetary Imaging and Spectroscopy (APIS) service

TL;DR

APIS is an online platform providing access to processed auroral observations of outer planets and satellites, enabling efficient search and interactive analysis for planetary and space physics research.

Contribution

It offers a comprehensive, VO-compliant database of HST auroral observations with advanced search and online analysis tools, enhancing research capabilities.

Findings

Facilitates statistical studies of auroral phenomena

Enables multi-instrumental and multi-spectral data analysis

Supports long-term and comparative planetary research

Abstract

The Auroral Planetary Imaging and Spectroscopy (APIS) service, accessible online, provides an open and interactive access to processed auroral observations of the outer planets and their satellites. Such observations are of interest for a wide community at the interface between planetology and magnetospheric and heliospheric physics. APIS consists of (i) a high level database, built from planetary auroral observations acquired by the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) since 1997 with its mostly used Far-UltraViolet spectro-imagers, (ii) a dedicated search interface aimed at browsing efficiently this database through relevant conditional search criteria and (iii) the ability to interactively work with the data online through plotting tools developed by the Virtual Observatory (VO) community, such as Aladin and Specview. This service is VO compliant and can therefore also been queried by external search tools of the VO community. The diversity of available data and the capability to sort them out by relevant physical criteria shall in particular facilitate statistical studies, on long-term scales and/or multi-instrumental multi-spectral combined analysis.