A Cubesat Mission Concept to Understand the Underlying Physical Processes for Radio Scintillation

Radio wave scintillation is recognized as a major space weather hazard that hinders radio communication and global navigation satellite systems (GNSS). Despite its importance, critical questions remain concerning where and when scintillation occurs in relation to larger-scale ionospheric phenomena, like aurora, and causative physical processes. Past studies have characterized some of the very basic features of scintillation. Additionally, a large number of studies have covered various aspects of measurements and theories of ionospheric irregularities and radio wave scintillation caused by turbulent media. However, we still do not understand the primary generation mechanisms of plasma density irregularities that cause scintillation in the auroral zone. Are they generated by internal ionosphere instabilities or by energetic electron precipitation? The Auroral Network for Ionosphere imaging with CubeSats (ANTICS), a NASA Heliophysics Flight Opportunities for Research and Technology (HFORT) mission concept is a novel, two-cubesat investigation with an array of nine ground-based observatories (GBO) dedicated to scintillation science. It will characterize different processes for ionospheric irregularities that result in scintillation by making high time and spatial resolution measurements of ionospheric scintillation, flows, temperature, density, and total electron content (TEC) observations between satellite and ground, as well as ground-based imagery of auroral precipitation. The two 6U spacecraft (S/C) will fly in a sun-synchronous, low Earth orbit (LEO) in a leader-follower configuration over the premagnetic midnight auroral zone. In this work, we present detailed information about ANTICS science, instrumentation, and mission implementation.