Related papers: The CUbesat Solar Polarimeter (CUSP): mission over…
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…
The Solar Neutrino and Astro-Particle PhYsics (SNAPPY) Cubesat is expected to launch in 2025 and it will carry into a polar orbit a prototype test detector for solar neutrino background studies while over the Earth's poles for the neutrino…
The Star-Planet Activity Research CubeSat (SPARCS) is a NASA-funded astrophysics mission, devoted to the study of the ultraviolet (UV) time-domain behavior in low-mass stars. Given their abundance and size, low-mass stars are important…
The second Miniature X-ray Solar Spectrometer (MinXSS-2) CubeSat, which begins its flight in late 2018, builds on the success of MinXSS-1, which flew from 2016-05-16 to 2017-05-06. The science instrument is more advanced -- now capable of…
Cube satellites, or CubeSats, are small satellites commonly used to perform Earth imaging and on-orbit scientific experiments. CubeSats are often powered using expensive, inflexible commercial-off-the-shelf solar panels, largely due to a…
In Coulomb drag propulsion, a long high voltage tether or system of tethers gathers momentum from a natural plasma stream such as solar wind or ionospheric plasma ram flow. A positively polarised tether in the solar wind can be used for…
We describe a low-cost, open-access, CubeSat-based calibration instrument that is designed to support ground-based and sub-orbital experiments searching for various polarization signals in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). All modern…
This paper presents a mission concept that enables Earth-Mars communications resistant to periods of solar conjunction by using CubeSat satellites equipped with a solar sail. The dynamics of the satellite is modeled separately in the…
The undergraduate-led Polarization-modUlated Laser Satellite Experiment (PULSE-A) at the University of Chicago seeks to demonstrate the feasibility of circular polarization shift keyed satellite-to-ground laser communication. PULSE-A's…
We examine spectropolarimetric data from the CoMP instrument, acquired during the evolution of the September 10th 2017 X8.2 solar flare on the western solar limb. CoMP captured linearly polarized light from two emission lines of Fe XIII at…
Solar flare electron acceleration is an extremely efficient process, but the method of acceleration is not well constrained. Two of the essential diagnostics: electron anisotropy (velocity angle to the guiding magnetic field) and the high…
The POLAR Investigation of the Sun (POLARIS) mission uses a combination of a gravity assist and solar sail propulsion to place a spacecraft in a 0.48 AU circular orbit around the Sun with an inclination of 75 degrees with respect to solar…
In this paper, we evaluate the viability of CubeSats as an attractive platform for lightweight instrumentation by describing a proof of concept CubeSat that houses an astrophotonic chip for transit spectroscopy-based exoplanet atmosphere…
HaloSat is a small satellite (CubeSat) designed to map soft X-ray oxygen line emission across the sky in order to constrain the mass and spatial distribution of hot gas in the Milky Way. The goal of HaloSat is to help determine if hot gas…
BICEP is a ground-based millimeter-wave bolometric array designed to target the primordial gravity wave signature on the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) at degree angular scales. Currently in its third year of…
Recent advances in the size, weight, and power (SWaP) requirements for space-based sensing have dramatically increased the demand for high-bandwidth downlink. However, high data rate RF transceivers still pose significant SWaP and cost…
This paper describes the Polarization Spectroscopic Telescope Array (PolSTAR), a mission proposed to NASA's 2014 Small Explorer (SMEX) announcement of opportunity. PolSTAR measures the linear polarization of 3-50 keV (requirement; goal:…
The Low Energy Polarization Detector (LPD) is a key component of the next-generation large-scale Gamma-Ray Burst polarimeter, POLAR-2. It is designed for polarization observations of transient sources in the soft X-ray energy range with a…
The goal of the Miniature X-ray Solar Spectrometer (MinXSS) CubeSat is to explore the energy distribution of soft X-ray (SXR) emissions from the quiescent Sun, active regions, and during solar flares, and to model the impact on Earth's…
POLAR is a novel compact Compton X-ray polarimeter designed to measure the linear polarization of the prompt emission of Gamma Ray Bursts (GRB) and other strong transient sources such as soft gamma repeaters and solar flares in the energy…