After three years in orbit, the European Sunstorm CubeSat re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere on 4 September, completing its mission to observe the X-ray emission from the Sun’s flares, a source that disrupts the atmosphere. These flares are sometimes accompanied by the displacement of blood vessels that leak billions of tons of material from the solar wind.
On Earth, storms can damage critical infrastructure, including radio communications and power grids. In space, they disrupt satellites: In May, the largest solar storm in more than 20 years pushed low-sky satellites toward Earth at a rate of 180 meters per day for four days. These events threaten the increasing number of research and business transactions in space, making solar weather forecasting an opportunity of high demand. The adoption of solar mass X-ray tracking technology may allow better weather forecasting than before and make it easier to protect satellites in orbit and facilities on Earth.
Sunstorm CubeSat is Isaware’s X-ray Flux Monitor for CubeSats (XFM-CS) to monitor the solar wind.enough
Storms start the solar cycle interacting in the year 2021 as a piggyback CubeSat aboard the Vega rocket of the European Space Agency (ESA), launched from French Guiana at an altitude of 551 kilometers. Kuva Space gathered the information from its ground station in Espoo, Finland.
The small satellite is an advanced spectrometer from a Finnish startup enough. The X-ray Flux Observatory for CubeSat (XFM-CS) observes the outermost part of the solar wind, the corona. By monitoring changes in the structure of the solar plasma, XFM-CS discovered changes between the bright magnetic field and its surroundings. The results add to data obtained from existing methods, such as ultra-violet and neural imaging, to provide a more comprehensive picture of the solar flare.
“The solar flare is known to be the first link in the cosmic weather chain, [so] “Looking at their research can provide a greater understanding of the processes involved in the development of climate and space and make predictions more accurate,” said Arto Lehtolainen, an instrumental scientist at Isaware. “The best protection against the adverse effects of space weather is to temporarily shut down the system during these events.”
Isaware’s ultimate goal is to apply spectroscopic measurements for near-term forecasting. That starts with understanding the changes in plasma structure involved in solar flares. “By measuring the plasma temperature and the time between the ignition, the maximum temperature, and the maximum density, and combining these with the physical size of the glowing loop determined by ultra-violet imaging fear, it will be possible to determine the amount of plasma released into the atmosphere during the explosion, and its duration,” he says Lehtolainen.
The €1 million (US $1.1 million) mission collected data on about two dozen X-class flares (the most powerful class of flares), hundreds of M-class flares (the second most powerful), and above 2,000 small flares. Covering the ascending part of 25 solar cycles, the massive Sunstorm dataset could inform scientific literature for years to come. Some results already have it was publishedbut the analysis of the latest data continues at the University of Helsinki and Isaware.
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Windows into the Corona sun
The legacy of XFM-CS began in 1998 when University of Helsinki professor Juhani Huovelin proposed a high-performance, small spectrometer – called the X-ray Solar Monitor (XSM) – for the ESA SMART-1 lunar mission. Huovelin, now the president and chief founder of Isaware, said that the XSM does not need optics because it only measures the X-ray spectrum of the sun, which is used as a calibration input for SMART-1’s D -CIXS to measure the brightness of the moon. up.
The XSM is the first high-resolution instrument of its kind to measure the Sun’s soft X-ray spectrum in the 1 to 20 kiloelectron-volt (keV) range. Huovelin later discovered that the instrument could be adjusted to study the Sun’s corona.
For the sun’s rays, Isaware reduced this idea to an X-ray spectrometer to detect radiation from the sun’s rays. The company successfully packed the CubeSat model, a class of nanosatellites based on a customized 10 centimeter box..
XFM-CS introduces Isaware’s novel silicon drift detector, an ants and turning photon energy and electric charge from the photoelectric input. The technology brings many performance improvements over similar detectors. Lehtolainen says the silicon drift design reduces capacitance, which reduces the level of electronic noise in the signal chain to support digital pulse processing that is more than ten times faster than previous systems. XFM-CS is also resistant to radiation damage, maintaining good resolution (180 eV and 6 keV) throughout the operation.
“The sun’s X-ray output varies by about six orders of magnitude from solar minimum to X-class luminosity,” says Lehtolainen. strong.” “The speed of the XFM-CS enabled better signal-to-noise and lower levels of pulse heating at a much higher power level than previously deployed devices without power resolution.”
XFM-CS featured Isaware’s novel silicon drift detector, which reduced noise from the satellite’s electronics. Isaware and being hollow
During Sunstorm operations, flash memory data was collected from the satellite computer and downloaded directly from the space station. Kuva Space founder and chief engineer Janne Kuhno said the process was done for every orbit almost every day, with the exception of a few maintenance stops.
The consistent performance of XFM-CS extended the mission a year longer than planned. “The resolution produced by XFM-CS exceeds existing instruments in many ways and still works well at the end of the registration process, so the link is seen as useful to scientists. continues,” Kuhno says.
There is potential for a new standard in solar X-ray monitoring
Today, most solar X-ray data comes from sensors on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES), which provide only X-ray data in two broadband channels.
With a higher energy resolution than GOES detectors, XFM-CS introduced a method to monitor both solar X-ray fluxes. and spectrum for solar flares, and standard broadband data. In 2022, the instrument captured a large solar flare consistent with GOES data, supporting the science-level analysis of the Sunstorm.
The XFM-CS X-ray diffraction values are generally consistent with measurements from the NOAA GOES satellite.European Space Agency
Huovelin says, “X-ray measurements can be replaced with high-resolution spectroscopic measurements for X-ray lesions of the solar corona and light intensity.
Following the success of Sunstorm, Isaware is opens an enhanced version of XFM designed to be more sensitive to radiation. The instrument will be connected to NOAA’s Space Weather NEXT observatory, Should start in 2029 to Lagrange 1 at the boundary of the Sun-Earth system.
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