"FulminoSat: A CubeSat Constellation to Study the Ionosphere with Multi-Modal Lightning Signals"

Michael Peterson
Director, Severe Storms Research Center
Georgia Tech Research Institute

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Abstract: The modern interconnected world increasingly relies on technologies that are impacted by space weather. Common modes of radio communications are susceptible to disruption from all types of solar storms that perturb the ionospheric plasma. Disturbances impact signal propagation or create communications blackout conditions in critical high-latitude regions. Our ability to monitor these disturbances is limited to land via sensor density, to serendipitous orbital alignments, or to the source of the ionospheric disturbance – X-rays, energetic electrons, or energetic protons – in the case of operational modeling. Improvements to the spatial and temporal sampling of ionospheric disturbances regardless of radiation source is needed to provide improved situational awareness of disturbances, to quantify risk and impacts to advanced technologies, and to understand basic ionospheric physics questions. We are developing the FulminoSat constellation that will use distributed multi-modal space-based sensing of signals of opportunity (lightning) to complement current sensing systems to meet these needs.