One of the greatest challenge facing current space weather monitoring operations is forecasting the arrival of coronal mass ejections (CMEs) and Solar Energetic Particles (SEPs) within their Earth-Sun propagation timescales. Current campaigns mainly rely on extreme ultra-violet and white light observations to create forecasts, missing out many potential events that may be hazardous to Earth's infrastructure undetectable at these wavelengths. Here we introduce the SURROUND mission, a constellation of CubeSats each with identical radio spectrometers, and the results of the initial Phase-0 study for the concept. The main goal of SURROUND is to monitor and track solar radio bursts (SRBs), widely utilised as a useful diagnostic for space weather activity, and revolutionise current forecasting capabilities. The Phase-0 study concludes that SURROUND can achieve its mission objectives using 3 - 5 spacecraft using current technologies with feasible SEP and CME forecasting potential: a first for heliospheric monitors.
@article{arxiv.2308.04194,
title = {The science behind SURROUND: a constellation of CubeSats around the Sun},
author = {D. M. Weigt and L. A. Cañizares and S. A. Maloney and S. A. Murray and E. P. Carley and P. T. Gallagher and A. Macario-Rojas and N. Crisp and C. McGrath},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2308.04194},
year = {2024}
}
Comments
12 pages, 3 figures, 2 tables, submitted to Planetary, Solar and Heliospheric Radio Emissions IX, held 26-28 September, 2022 [ACCEPTED]; Edited by: C. K. Louis, C. M. Jackman, G. Fischer, A. H. Sulaiman, P. Zucca, Publishers: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies and Trinity College Dublin. (these authors contributed equally to this work: D. M. Weigt, L. A. Ca\~nizares)