GEOScan: A Geoscience Facility from Space

Geoscience is at the dawn of a new era, and the past decade has seen a confluence of events supporting this statement. Many geoscientists believe that future discovery and understanding of our Earth environment requires taking a view of the Earth-atmosphere-geospace as a complete system. Motivated by this revelation is the growing view that as researchers we cannot tackle many open questions without global coverage of key measurements. Fortunately, many measurements of interest support the deployment of global and dense arrays of instrumentation on both the ground and space based platforms. Due to technological advancements in commercial of the shelf (COTS) instrumentation these global measurements are now achievable at a fraction of the historic cost. This cost reduction results from using commercially developed instruments that are repurposed from their original consumer and industrial uses, such as GPS, inertial measurement, and magnetometers, and new low cost access to space via commercially available hosted payloads, sub-orbital flights, and CubeSats. We will present recent research on this topic in general, and focus specifically on the GEOScan initiative to place instruments on the Iridium NEXT constellation of satellite. GEOScan science addresses open questions in gravity, space physics, and climate that require a global constellation for progress.