Space Weather Observations from Spire's Growing CubeSat Constellation
Presenter:
Vu Nguyen
Spire Global
Spire Global, GPS Solutions
Talk
Spire Global, Inc. is a leading player in the nanosatellite sector and the first to provide commercial, low-cost GNSS radio occultation measurements to support critical weather data for numerical weather prediction. Spire has ambitious goals of collecting over 100,000 radio occultation profiles per day, providing robust coverage of atmospheric measurements over the entire planet.
In addition to augmenting the global Earth observing system with an unprecedented amount of high quality vertical atmospheric profiles, GNSS signals collected from Spire’s constellation also carry a wealth of information about the ionosphere. Each Spire satellite currently tracks 1 Hz, dual-frequency GNSS phase measurements through zenith and limb pointing antennas that are processed to produce slant total electron content (TEC) estimates with low latency. Low-elevation GNSS links passing through the ionospheric portion below the satellite orbit are also used for electron density profile inversions. Additional 50 Hz phase data, primarily used for lower neutral atmospheric RO processing, are utilized to resolve finer scale features of the E-region ionosphere, such as gravity waves and sporadic E-layers. Spire’s ionospheric observational capabilities are highlighted in this talk by providing an overview of the measurement data and processing algorithms. We also review recent results describing the coverage, quality, and potential applications of the constellation data.
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