Small Space Weather Research Mission Designed Fully by Students

1 of 2 Copyright 2011 by the American Geophysical Union Students at the University of Colorado at Boulder are building a satellite to study the space weather generated by high-energy particles near the Earth. The Colorado Student Space Weather Experiment (CSSWE) is a CubeSat mission funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, scheduled for launch into a low-Earth polar orbit in June 2012 as a secondary payload under NASA’s Educational Launch of Nanosatellites (ELaNa) program. CSSWE will observe energetic particles for a minimum of 3 months with two goals: to relate the location, magnitude, and frequency of solar flares to the timing, duration, and energy spectrum of solar energetic particles (SEP) reaching Earth and to determine the evolution of the energy spectrum of radiation belt electrons. To accomplish these objectives, CSSWE will measure energetic ions and electrons coming directly from the Sun while it traverses the polar regions, where Earth’s magnetic field lines are directly connected to the interplanetary magnetic field. CSSWE will also measure radiation belt particles at lower latitudes. These types of radiation can affect the operations and life spans of Earth-orbiting spacecraft. Solar particles incident over the polar caps also produce ionospheric disturbances that can affect radio frequency communications. CSSWE (see Figure 1) consists of three stacked CubeSat units, each 10 × 10 × 10 centimeters, that together will contain a single science payload, the Relativistic Electron and Proton Telescope integrated little experiment (REPTile). REPTile is a miniaturization of the Relativistic Electron and Proton Telescope (REPT) currently being built at University of Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) for the NASA Radiation Belt Storm Probes (RBSP) mission, which consists of two identical spacecraft scheduled to launch in May 2012 that will go through the heart of the radiation belts in a low-inclination orbit. REPTile is designed to measure the directional differential flux of protons ranging between 10 and 40 megaelectron volts and electrons ranging between 0.5 and 3 megaelectron volts. These energetic particle measurements will be used in conjunction with flare measurements from other spacecraft, such as the Extreme Ultraviolet Variability Experiment on NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory and the Solar X-Ray Imager on NOAA’s Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite