Applications And Potentials Of Intelligent Swarms For Magnetospheric Studies

TL;DR

The paper proposes a novel satellite swarm mission, APIS, using 40 CubeSats to study Earth's magnetosphere with higher spatial resolution than traditional monolithic satellites, enabling detailed plasma process analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a new swarm-based approach for magnetospheric research, detailing design feasibility and system requirements for the APIS mission.

Findings

Feasibility of deploying 40 CubeSats in elliptical orbits for magnetospheric studies.

Design considerations for satellite subsystems including navigation, communication, and power.

Potential to improve spatial resolution of magnetospheric measurements.

Abstract

Earth's magnetosphere is vital for today's technologically dependent society. To date, numerous design studies have been conducted and over a dozen science missions have own to study the magnetosphere. However, a majority of these solutions relied on large monolithic satellites, which limited the spatial resolution of these investigations, as did the technological limitations of the past. To counter these limitations, we propose the use of a satellite swarm carrying numerous and distributed payloads for magnetospheric measurements. Our mission is named APIS (Applications and Potentials of Intelligent Swarms), which aims to characterize fundamental plasma processes in the Earth's magnetosphere and measure the effect of the solar wind on our magnetosphere. We propose a swarm of 40 CubeSats in two highly-elliptical orbits around the Earth, which perform radio tomography in the magnetotail at 8-12 Earth Radii (RE) downstream, and the subsolar magnetosphere at 8-12RE upstream. In addition, in-situ measurements of the magnetic and electric fields, plasma density will be performed by on-board instruments. In this article, we present an outline of previous missions and designs for magnetospheric studies, along with the science drivers and motivation for the APIS mission. Furthermore, preliminary design results are included to show the feasibility of such a mission. The science requirements drive the APIS mission design, the mission operation and the system requirements. In addition to the various science payloads, critical subsystems of the satellites are investigated e.g., navigation, communication, processing and power systems. We summarize our findings, along with the potential next steps to strengthen our design study.