Electric Potential and Field Instrument for CubeSat (EPIC)

Upcoming NASA Earth and Space Science missions as well as planetary exploration missions will require improvements in particle and field sensors and associated instrument technologies. Technology developments are needed that result in expanded measurement capabilities and a reduction in size, mass, power, and cost. To that end, NASA has become increasingly interested in the use of small spacecraft platforms such as CubeSats. Many of the sensors required for measurement of an electric field are extremely sensitive to fields created by the spacecraft electronics and therefore must be positioned on orbit at a significant distance from the spacecraft. This presents major challenges for the accommodation of this type of instrument on a CubeSat platform. In particular, several miniaturized booms must be stowed in a very small volume for launch and must have sufficient deployed properties to allow for high pointing accuracy, adequate deployed stiffness and thermal stability on orbit. In the proposed effort, Composite Technology Development, Inc. (CTD) and the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) will collaborate to provide an electric field instrument containing miniaturized sensor electronics and thermally stable, compactly stowed and structurally rigid graphite composite booms to measure electric fields effectively on a low-cost CubeSat platform.

Our present understanding of magnetosphere-ionosphere coupling is limited, partly due to the lack of broad statistical observations of the 3-dimensional (3D) electric field in the altitude region between 300 and 1000km. The proposed CubeSat E-field instrument will enable measurements to be made economically in this region. This is relevant to the scientific goals outlined in the 2013-2022 decadal survey in solar and space physics, as stated: "Determine the dynamics and coupling of the earth's magnetosphere, ionosphere and atmosphere and their response to solar and terrestrial inputs." It is also relevant to the NASA 2009 Heliophysics Roadmap, as outlined in the living with a star science queue: "Dynamic Geospace Coupling: Understand how magnetospheric dynamics provide energy into the coupled ionosphere-magnetosphere system." In addition, the proposed boom technology can be used for magnetometers, particle sensors, gravity gradient stabilization for small spacecraft, or for deploying solar sails, solar arrays and phased array antennas.

The U.S. military has increasing interest in utilizing low-cost spacecraft platforms that can be rapidly launched for the purposes of Space Situational Awareness (SSA) and space weather monitoring. The proposed instrument would have applicability for missions similar to the Air Force's Communications/Navigation Outage Forecasting System (C/NOFS) , which allows the U.S. military to predict the effects of ionospheric activity on signals from communication and navigation satellites, outages of which could potentially cause problems in battlefield situations. In addition, both military and commercial satellites could use gravity gradient booms, instrument booms, optical and antenna reflectors, sunshades, deorbiting systems, solar arrays, phased arrays, and solar sails based on this deployment technology. Commercial demand is expected to increase as well. Elizabeth Buchen, director of SpaceWorks' engineering economics group, believes steady growth of the market will lead to a total of 2,000 to 2,750 small spacecraft seeking launches from 2014 through 2020.

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