THE ESA NANOSATELLITE BEACONS FOR SPACE WEATHER MONITORING STUDY(ESA SP-625)

摘要

This paper presents preliminary results from this ESAfundedstudy, which is now under final review by ESA,due for public release later this year. The primary aimof the study has been to investigate how current andemerging concepts for nanosats may be used tomonitor space weather conditions and provideimproved access to data needed for space weatherservices.The study has reviewed present and future micro andnano-technology (MNT) developments that could beused to implement space weather monitoring bynanosats. It has also has established a set of spaceweather measurement requirements appropriate tonanosats solutions and developed a set of instrumentand spacecraft solutions to address those requirements.A week-long co-located 'solutions workshop' was heldat ESTEC in Feb 2005 to support this work.This background information was then subject to adetailed system and mission analysis to trade-off anddevelop a range of potential mission and spacecraftarchitectures, and derive costs for programmedevelopment, operation and maintenance over a tenyearperiod, implemented from 2010-2015. Runningconcurrently with the mission/system analysis, thestudy reviewed the results of the previous stages anddeveloped a report on the prospects for a space weathernanosat programme and recommendations on themeasures needed to enable implementation of such aprogramme. To support this step a small workshop washeld at ESTEC following the MNT Round Table late in2005.