3UCubed: The IMAP Student Collaboration CubeSat Project
Abstract
The 3UCubed project is a 3U CubeSat being jointly developed by the University of New Hampshire, Sonoma State University, and Howard University as a part of the NASA Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe, IMAP, student collaboration. This project comprises of a multidisciplinary team of undergraduate students from all three universities. The mission goal of the 3UCubed is to understand how Earths polar upper atmosphere the thermosphere in Earths auroral regions, responds to particle precipitation and solar wind forcing, and internal magnetospheric processes. 3UCubed includes two instruments with rocket heritage to achieve the science mission: an ultraviolet photomultiplier tube, UVPMT, and an electron retarding potential analyzer ERPA. The spacecraft bus consists of the following subsystems: Attitude Determination and Control, Command and Data Handling, Power, Communication, Structural, and Thermal. Currently, the project is in the post-PDR stage, starting to build and test engineering models to develop a FlatSat prior to critical design review in 2023. The goal is to launch at least one 3U CubeSat to collect science data close to the anticipated peak of Solar Cycle 25 around July 2025. Our mother mission, IMAP, is also projected to launch in 2025, which will let us jointly analyze the science data of the main mission, providing the solar wind measurements and inputs to the magnetosphere with that of 3UCubed, providing the response of Earths cusp to these inputs.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2211.15781,
title = {3UCubed: The IMAP Student Collaboration CubeSat Project},
author = {Marcus Alfred and Sonya Smith and Charles Kim and Carissma McGee and Ruth Davis and Myles Pope and Taran Richardson and Trinity Sager and Avery Williams and Matthew Gales and Wilson Jean Baptiste and Tyrese Kierstdet and Oluwatamilore Ogunbanjo and Laura Peticolas and Lynn Cominsky and Garrett Jernigan and Jeffrey Reedy and Doug Clarke and Sabrina Blais and Erik Castellanos-Vasquez and Jack Dawson and Erika Diaz Ramirez and Walter Foster and Cristopher Gopar Carreno and Haley Joerger and Onasis Mora and Alex Vasquez and Sanjeev Mehta and Noé Lugaz and Lindsay Bartolone and Marc Lessard Jenna Burgett and Kelly Bisson and Luke Bradley and Jeffrey Campbell and Mathieu Champagne and Alex Chesley and Jeff Grant and Hanyu Jiang and Jared King and Emily McLain and Matthew Rollend and Shane Woods},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2211.15781},
year = {2022}
}