AMICal Sat, ATISE and WFAI: three space instruments for auroral monitoring

A lack of observable quantities renders it generally difficult to confront models of Space Weather with experimental data and drastically reduces the forecast accuracy. This is especially true for the region of Earth’s atmosphere between altitudes of 90 km and 300 km, which is practically inaccessible, except by means of remote sensing techniques. This paper describes two space missions, AMICal Sat and ATISE. These satellites will perform measurements of auroral emissions in order to reconstruct the deposition of particle precipitations in auroral regions. ATISE is a 12U CubeSat with a spectrometer and imager payloads. The spectrometer is built using the micro-Spectrometer-On-a-Chip (µSPOC) technology. It will work in the 370–900 nm wavelength range and allow for short exposure times of around 1 s. The spectrometer will have six lines of sight. The joint imager is a miniaturized wide-field imager. Observation will be done at the limb and will enable reconstruction of the vertical profile of the auroral emissions. AMICal Sat is a 2U CubeSat that will embed the imager of ATISE and will observe the aurora both in limb and nadir configurations. As a follow up, we also develop an hyperspaectral instrument for the ESA D3S mission named Wide Field Auroral Imager. AMICal Sat launch is schedule for July 2019 and we hope to be able to present the first results of these measurements. ATISE will be launch in 2021.

Data interpretation will be done using the forward Transsolo code, a 1D kinetic code solving the Boltzmann equation along a local vertical and enabling simulation of the thermospheric and ionospheric emissions using precipitation data as input.