This is a 3 year effort to design, construct, and operate a 3U CubeSat mission named Optical Profiling of the Atmospheric Limb (OPAL) designed to understand the thermospheric temperature signatures of the dynamic solar, geomagnetic and internal atmospheric forcing. OPAL will measure lower thermospheric temperatures from 90?140 km altitude by observing the daytime O2 A-band (near 762nm) emission with a high-sensitivity, hyper-spectral limb imager. The instrument will be incorporated into a 3U Colony 2 CubeSat provided by the National Reconnaissance Office.
The lower thermosphere is an important interface between the lower and upper atmosphere, but progress in our understanding has been hindered by a paucity of measurements in this critical region. The OPAL mission will help fill this gap by providing much needed global observations of the neutral temperatures, which in turn will lead to an improved understanding of the physical processes that are responsible for day-to-day changes in the I/T system on global, regional, and local scales. In particular, it is important to measure how energy propagates from high to lower latitudes and to quantify the wave coupling between the lower and upper atmosphere. OPAL will directly measure the thermal response at low and middle latitudes to geomagnetic activity. OPAL will quantify the global characteristics of waves from below within the lower thermosphere by measuring their temperature signatures.
The mission is being proposed jointly by the Space Dynamics Laboratory at Utah State University (USU/SDL) and the University of Maryland Eastern Shore (UMES), the Hawk Institute for Space Sciences (HISS) and Dixie State College of Utah (DSC). A majority of the OPAL mission will be developed and implemented by graduate and undergraduate students with professional staff serving as mentors. The program will combine USU/SDL, UMES, HISS, and DSC student training and participation. Physics students will play a major role in the science team, data analysis, and publication of the scientific findings. Engineering students will produce spacecraft and instrument design drawings, develop, integrate and test hardware, and calibrate the instrument. The OPAL mission also would be the first cubesat to fly a scientific hyper-spectral imager payload. Hyper-spectral imaging measurements are extremely important to many areas of research, including atmospheric chemistry, ocean depth and temperature, land-use, ecology, astronomy, and surveillance. It's a challenging payload for a cubesat mission due to the requirements (power, attitude control, data rates, etc) the imager poses on the cubesat system, making this a high-risk-high-reward project.
