Growing and Sustaining the PlasmaPy Software Ecosystem

PlasmaPy is an open source Python package containing core functionality for plasma science. Overall, the mission of the PlasmaPy project is to grow a fully open source software ecosystem for plasma research and education: a collection of scientific software packages that are developed together, work together, and co-evolve in the same environment. The project team will expand PlasmaPy to include additional, powerful tools for analyzing data from the most important and widely used diagnostics for both high energy density physics and magnetized laboratory plasma experiments. The team will expand functionality needed by the heliophysics community to analyze and understand measurements of plasma in the solar wind, Earth’s magnetosphere, and coronal mass ejections. The team will develop software infrastructure in PlasmaPy to make laboratory plasma data sets findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR) and improve the plasma science data environment. Because few members of the plasma community have much experience making open source contributions, the project team will (1) organize three summer schools for students and scientists to learn how to contribute to an open source software project like PlasmaPy, (2) forge a partnership between PlasmaPy and the Computational Research Access Network (CRANE); and (3) provide numerous training opportunities for undergraduate, postbaccalaureate, and graduate students. The proposed code development and data environment improvements, focused on three topical areas and in collaboration with researchers in these fields, will increase adoption of PlasmaPy while improving scientific productivity through coordinated software development and metadata standardization. The proposed training efforts will tackle research software engineering (RSE) skills gaps within the community, and significantly grow the contributor pool for PlasmaPy. Both of these proposed efforts will lead to long-term sustainability of the PlasmaPy Project software ecosystem and maximize its impact on plasma science innovation and education.