SCION: CubeSat Mission Concept to Observe Midlatitude Small-Scale Irregularities and Scintillation

The SCintillation and Ionospheric Occultation NanoSats (SCION) mission concept is to deploy two low-cost CubeSat spacecraft that maintain a separation distance <1 km to measure scintillation and associated small-scale density irregularities in the midlatitude ionosphere. Each spacecraft is equipped with a dual frequency GPS receiver to measure total electron content (TEC) and the S4 scintillation index along raypaths from the receiver to the GPS constellation. Scintillation causing small-scale density irregularities are increasingly observed in the vicinity of large TEC gradients associated with storm enhanced density (SED) regions. Detection of irregularities of the scale that cause GPS and VHF scintillation has previously relied on assumptions about their structural stability and drift speed. Space-based, multipoint observations would provide broad, regional coverage and disambiguation of temporal and spatial density fluctuations in order to detect small-scale irregularities without these assumptions.