Increased fidelity space weather data collection using a non-linear CubeSat network

Our understanding of the Low Earth Orbit (LEO) space environment is limited by data collected from in-situ space borne instrumentation. Localized variations in this environment can go undetected due to a lack of instrumentation coverage. Existing high performance systems are relatively high cost and built in low quantities, therefore providing limited simultaneous coverage of discrete locations in LEO. Low cost systems built at the academia level are traditionally stand alone, and are not designed to work in networks of systems. The CubeSat standard is quickly becoming the satellite bus platform of choice for low cost academia developers. The fundamental constraints on CubeSat designs substantially limit their ability to compete with heritage space systems in terms of data throughput. By applying CubeSats to on-orbit networks, an increase in their effective data throughput can be achieved. A candidate system architecture has been developed which uses CubeSats equipped with high data rate short-range communications subsystems, networked and tethered to a microsatellite based host vehicle. By implementing a host-slave communications architecture, the CubeSat data downlink rates are increased by four orders of magnitude. A performance simulator was developed and used to compare heritage systems to the traditional CubeSat architecture, and the candidate host-slave architecture for the purposes of creating a low cost high resolution space weather data collection system. Modeling and simulation has demonstrated the CubeSat based host-slave architecture is capable of data rates which support spatial resolutions meeting or exceeding the performance of heritage system sensors, which have been used as the baseline for several existing space weather models.