After three years in orbit, Europe’s Sunstorm CubeSat re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere on September 4, completing its mission to monitor X-ray pulses from solar flares, which underlie disruptive space weather phenomena. These flares are sometimes accompanied by erupting coronal mass ejections Billions of tons of material from the atmosphere of the sun
On Earth, space storms can damage critical infrastructure, including radio communications and the power grid. In space, they disrupt satellites: In May, the largest solar storm in more than 20 years pushed low-orbiting satellites and space debris toward Earth at a rate of 180 meters per day for four days. These events threaten a growing number of research and commercial projects in space, making solar weather forecasting a high-demand opportunity. Sunstorm’s approval of high-resolution X-ray tracking technology could provide better space weather forecasting capabilities than ever before, making it easier to protect satellites in orbit and infrastructure on Earth.
The Sunstorm CubeSat carried the Isaware X-ray Flux Monitor for CubeSats (XFM-CS) to monitor the Sun’s outermost atmosphere.enough
The solar storm began its orbit at the same time as the sun In 2021 As a piggyback CubeSat on the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Vega rocket, launched from French Guiana to an altitude of 551 km. Cova Space coordinated the mission from its ground station in Espoo, Finland.
The miniature satellite carried a specialized high-resolution spectrometer from a Finnish startup enough. The X-ray Flux Monitor for CubeSat (XFM-CS) observed the outermost part of the Sun’s atmosphere, the corona. By monitoring changes in the composition of the solar plasma, XFM-CS detected material exchanged between a flaring coronal magnetosphere and its surroundings. The results add to data obtained from existing methods, such as extreme ultraviolet imaging and coronagraphs, to provide a more complete picture of solar flare mechanics.
Solar flares are known as the first link in the space weather chain. [so] Observing them can provide a greater understanding of the mechanisms involved in the development of space weather and enable more accurate predictions, says Arto Lehtolainen, instrument scientist at Isaware. The best defense against the harmful effects of space weather is to temporarily shut down vulnerable systems during these events.
Isaware’s ultimate goal is to use spectroscopic measurements for real-time prediction. It starts with understanding the dynamics and composition of plasma in solar flares. By comparing the plasma temperature and the times between flares, maximum temperature, and maximum density, and combining these with the physical size of the flare ring determined from extreme ultraviolet images, it is possible to approximate the amount of plasma released into space. Eruption as well as its duration Lehtolainen.
The €1 million (US$1.1 million) mission collected data on about two dozen X-class flares (the most powerful flare class), several hundred M-class flares (the second most powerful), and more than 2,000 smaller flares. Covering a growing portion of solar cycle 25, the extensive Sunstorm dataset is likely to inform scientific publications for years to come. Some results have already has been publishedbut the latest data analysis continues at the University of Helsinki with Isaware.
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A window to the solar crown
The legacy of XFM-CS began in 1998 when University of Helsinki professor Johanni Hovlin proposed a high-performance, low-mass spectrometer – called the X-ray Solar Monitor (XSM) – for ESA’s SMART-1 moon mission. Huovelin, now president and co-founder of Isaware, says the XSM doesn’t need optics because it only measures the Sun’s integrated X-ray spectrum, which was then used as calibration input for the D-CIXS SMART-1 to measure the moon’s radiance. level
XSM was the first high-resolution instrument of its kind to measure the soft X-ray spectrum of the Sun in the 1 to 20 kiloelectronvolt (keV) range. Huovelin then realized that the instrument could be tuned to study the solar corona.
For Sunstorm, Isaware scaled this concept into a miniaturized X-ray spectrometer to detect pulses of solar flares. The company packaged the parts in CubeSat format, a class of nanosatellites based on standard 10cm boxes..
The XFM-CS features Isaware’s new silicon drift detector An ant-sized device that converts photon energy into an electric charge through photoelectric absorption. This technology brings several performance improvements over similar detectors. Lehtolainen says the silicon drift design minimizes capacitance, which reduces electronic noise levels and the signal amplification chain to support digital pulse processing that is more than 10 times faster than previous techniques. XFM-CS is also more resistant to radiation-induced energy degradation and maintains excellent resolution (180 eV at 6 keV) throughout the mission.
“The intensity of the solar X-ray emission varies by about six orders of magnitude from the quiescence times during solar minimum to the most powerful X-class solar flares,” says Lehtolainen. The speed of XFM-CS enabled a better signal-to-noise ratio and a lower level of pulse stacking over a wide dynamic range than previously flown devices, without reducing the energy resolution.
XFM-CS used Isaware’s new silicon drift detector, which reduced the noise of the satellite’s electronics. Isaware and Being Space
During Operation Sunstorm, flash memory data was collected from a computer on the satellite and automatically downloaded from the ground station. This process happens on almost every orbit every day, with the exception of a few maintenance outages, says John Kohno, co-founder and chief engineer of CovaSpace.
The stable performance of XFM-CS extended the mission a year longer than planned. “The data produced by XFM-CS surpassed existing instruments in many ways and was still fully functional at the end of the nominal mission, so the consortium felt it would be useful for the scientific community to continue the work,” Kohno says.
The potential for a new standard in solar X-ray monitoring
Today, most solar X-ray data come from sensors on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES), which only provide X-ray flux values ​​in two broadband channels.
With a higher energy resolution than the GOES detectors, XFM-CS introduced a method for continuous monitoring of both solar X-ray fluxes. and Spectra for solar flares, together with standard bandwidth data. In 2022, the instrument recorded a massive solar flare that matched the GOES data and confirmed the Sunstorm’s scientific observations.
XFM-CS X-ray flux values ​​are generally consistent with measurements from NOAA’s GOES satellites.European Space Agency
“GOES X-ray measurements of coronal X-ray fluxes and flare intensities can be replaced by high-resolution spectroscopic measurements that use the new XFM data,” says Huovelin.
Following Sunstorm’s success is Isaware Development of a minified version of XFM Designed to be more resistant to radiation. This instrument will be integrated into NOAA’s next Space Weather Observatory. It is scheduled to be launched in 2029 to the Lagrange point 1 of the Sun-Earth system.
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