Linda Habash Krause (ST13) attended the Science and Instruments Kick-off meeting for the ITASAT-2 Mission, held virtually on 10/18/22. ITASAT-2 is a follow-on mission to SPORT, and it consists of three 12U CubeSat spacecraft in a low-altitude Earth orbit to investigate plasma electrodynamics associated with the mechanisms that generate plasma bubbles. This meeting brought together the Instrument PIs (IPIs) with the systems engineers to discuss the mission concept resulting from more than a year of work by the Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica (ITA) designers based on instrument requirements provided by the IPIs. Bela Fejer of Utah State University (USU) is the Principal Investigator of ITASAT-2, which he stated was an excellent architecture to answer some outstanding questions regarding the electrodynamics of the ionosphere and its relationships with both lower atmospheric and higher-latitude magnetospheric processes.
Krause’s Charge Analyzer Responsive to Local Oscillations (CARLO) is one of the Science instruments since it is uniquely able to measure plasma irregularities in density and temperature up to 2.4 kHz, as demonstrated in MSFC’s Low Earth Orbit (LEO) plasma simulation chamber. ITA is funded to design the spacecraft bus, and Fejer will lead a NASA/ROSES/HFORT proposal effort to fund the U.S. IPIs and modelers as mission Co-Is with an initial target submission date of 3Q CY2023. A summary of the mission objectives appears in the below Figure.
