NASA Picks Four CubeSat Missions to Fill Gaps in Its Space Weather Monitoring and Analysis
Following a report warning of gaps in its observation capabilities, NASA is preparing a four-CubeSat test-bed launch.
NASA has announced the selection of four CubeSat projects for its Heliophysics Flight Opportunities in Research and Technology (HFORT) program, as it seeks to fill observation gaps in order to improve space weather forecasts.
"We're taking advantage of gains in small spacecraft technology to fill some of these critical gaps," explains Jim Spann, NASA space weather lead, "and evaluate how that advances our understanding of space weather and enables improvement of forecasting capabilities."
The idea behind the effort: To make use of the ultra-compact standardized CubeSat platform, which can be built much more rapidly and at a fraction of the cost of traditional satellite platforms, to fill in observation gaps noted in a report prepared by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (PDF).
The first of the four CubeSat missions selected, CubeSat Imaging X-Ray Solar Spectrometer (CubIXSS), will provide soft X-ray spectroscopy of solar coronal emissions as a means of studying the origins of hot plasma; the Sun Coronal Ejection Tracker (SunCET) mission looks to deploy a novel range detector capable of resolving low and middle corona to four solar radii; the DYNamics Atmosphere GLObal-Connection (DYNAGLO) mission targets gravity wave measurements in the thermosphere; and the final mission, WindCube, packs a small-form factor interferometer for a study of how thermospheric winds influence the Earth's ionosphere.
The study of space weather is seeing an explosion of interest of late. As well as NASA's planned CubeSat deployments, the Ham Radio Science Citizen Investigation (HamSCI) organization has been working on building a global network of Personal Space Weather Stations designed for taking ground-based measurements for researchers to access via a central database.
"Space isn't empty like we often think. The study of space weather is really just trying to understand the space environment around us," explains NASA space physics researcher Alexa Halford, "like we try to understand terrestrial weather.”
NASA has not yet confirmed launch dates for the missions.