Topical Discussion Meeting - ESA's Distributed Space Weather Sensor System (D3S)

Melanie Heil (ESA), Stefan Kraft (ESA), Juha-Pekka Luntama (ESA), Alexi Glover (ESA)
Wednesday 20/11, 16:00-17:15

ESA's Space Situational Awareness Programme aims at protecting space and ground assets against adverse effects from space. The Space Weather Segment is focussing on such effects due to the activity of our Sun.
Monitoring of the Earth's and Sun's environment is an essential task for the now- and forecasting of Space Weather and the modelling of interactions between the Sun and the Earth. Due to the asymmetry and complexity of Earth's magnetosphere, the involved particle environment and its dynamics, it is necessary to capture the state of the magnetic field and the particle distribution in a sufficiently large number of sampling points around the Earth, such that it allows state-monitoring and modelling of the involved processes with sufficient accuracy and timeliness.
ESA is implementing a space weather monitoring system, including the establishment of a Distributed Space Weather Sensor System (D3S) to observe the effects of solar activity within Earth's magnetosphere. Such satellite systems should benefit from the continuously improving performance of CubeSat, NanoSat and the SmallSat systems between 50 and 100 kg currently under development in different application areas. An important aspect for the realisation of miniaturised satellite observation systems for SSA is the need of high reliability, sufficiently long lifetime and low data latencies if considered for operational purposes. Space weather instrumentation may be highly miniaturised, and therefore appears to be well suited for small satellite systems, which could become competitive to the usually followed hosted payload approach while allowing for more flexibility with respect to the flown payload and orbital requirements.
In this TDM we would like to discuss the current status of ESA‘s D3S activities including measurement requirements targeting improved space weather services, together with the latest developments and possibilities in the use of CubeSats/NanoSats for Space Weather monitoring. The session will focus on discussion. Participants wishing to give a short presentation (3 slides maximum) are encouraged to contact the convenors in advance.