This is a short term (less than one-year) effort to organize and plan broad US participation and influence in the QB50 program, an international consortium to build, launch and fly 50 CubeSats simultaneously. A US Coordination Committee has been established to lead the effort with widespread representation of expertise and with strong links to the QB50 program organization. A specific product of the effort will be a report outlining a US participation plan, including descriptions of the CubeSats US organizations intend to provide, a participation packet and guidelines for US institutions, an easy to use participation program for high schools and colleges that don't have satellite programs, and policy hurdles and plan for participation in a EU led satellite program. Broad US community input, interest, and participation will be sought through a community workshop being conducted as part of this activity.
This funding enabled a year long effort to organize, design, and study the science justification for evolvement in the QB50 Project by a consortium of US-based research and teaching institutions/universities. As a consortium of US institutions called QBUS, we desire to participate in QB50, an international network of 50 CubeSats for multi-point, in-situ measurements in the largely-unexplored lower thermosphere and re-entry research. Led by the Von Karman Institute (VKI) of Belgium, the QB50 project is expected to be predominantly funded from the FP7 Grant by the European Union (EU). However, a funding gap exists which will expected to be covered by the participating CubeSat teams. All 50 CubeSats will be launched together in 2015 into a circular orbit at 320 km altitude, inclination 79?. Due to atmospheric drag, the orbits will decay and the CubeSats will be able to explore all layers of the lower thermosphere without the need for on-board propulsion, down to 90 or 100 km, depending on the quality of their thermal design. It is expected that the network will spread around the Earth within a month by deploying only one CubeSat during each orbit. The lifetime of the CubeSats from deployment until atmosphere re-entry will be less than three months. The QBUS team will employ 4 double CubeSats (1 from each university with system engineering and project management oversight provided by JHUAPL and USU-SDL), with participating members providing the usual satellite functions (attitude determination and control, uplink and downlink telecommunications, power subsystem including a battery and body-mounted solar cells, on-board data handling and storage by a CPU) as defined by the QB50 Call for Proposals, and the QB50 project providing the standardized sensors for lower thermosphere and re-entry research. The sensors have been specified by the QB50 Sensor Selection Working Group and are described in the Science Unit Interface Control Document. It is our desire to fly the Mullard Space Science Laboratory (MSSL) Ion-Neutral Mass Spectrometer (INMS) to accomplish our science goals. Our team would provide four flight units, along with the integrated payloads provided by QB50, which will be integrated by our QBUS partner institutions. Testing and delivery will be commensurate with the specified QB50 timeline. This first-of-a-kind thermospheric constellation of CubeSats will allow us to investigate the transition region between 100 ? 300 km where our atmosphere goes from well mixed, neutrally dominated forcing to heavily ionized, electrically dominated forcing. The change from pressure gradient driven responses to electric field driven dynamics provides a source term for momentum and energy transfer that is highly dynamic and often unpredictable. This leads to uncertainty in the behavior of density, winds, and temperatures of both the ions and the neutrals. There is also a lack of understanding of atmospheric composition in this region due to scarcity of measurements as well the influence of background parameters, chemistry, and forcing from the lower thermosphere.
