A CubeSat mission for plasmasphere monitoring for space weather impact prediction

Abstract

Space Weather observations and prediction of expected disturbances on ground and space-based infrastructures are critical for well-being and evolution of our modern society. Space weather events, like solar storms, can have crucial impact on navigation, communication, power grids and other electronical conducting infrastructures. Therefore, predictions are of high importance, but are still lacking an estimation of geo-effectivity of events as well as systems and regions affected. In the whole Sun Earth interaction chain, the plasmasphere is the crucial source of information in respect to the geo-effectivity of solar storms and not well covered until now. The compression and change of the plasma-pause is a source of direct information for the strength of the solar wind/solar storm impact. Hence, we suggest a CubeSat mission to provide essential data on the plasmasphere and plasmapause dynamics to allow detailed ionospheric storm onset and strength estimation increasing the capability to forecast disturbances on technical systems. The basic idea is to continuously monitor the movement/shift in the plasmapause boundary, using GNSS and DORIS signals as well as an onboard Langmuir probe on a satellite constellation of 3 CubeSats, orbiting at high inclination Polar orbits of about 7,000 km altitude. The novel concept was submitted to the ESA’s Open Space Innovation Platform (OSIP) competition in 2021 and selected for further study. Later the concept was tested with simulation studies using realistic satellite orbits under an ESA funded project called PM4SWIP (Plasmasphere Monitoring for Space Weather Impact Prediction). Our simulation results using a three-dimensional electron density model show that the GNSS total electron content (TEC) and in-situ electron density measurements from Langmuir probe can successfully detect the plasmapause location by identifying sharp changes in the TEC and electron density derivatives when the CubeSats fly over the mid-latitude regions.