Astrid 2, a low-budget microsatellite mission for auroral research

The next in the Astrid series of low-budget microsatellite missions will be devoted to classical auroral research. The challenge of this mission is to demonstrate the possibility to carry out comprehensive auroral investigations on a microsatellite platform having the size 0.45 x 0.45 x 0.3 m at a cost of about 2 MUSD. A successful mission will open up new less expensive ways carrying out auroral research in the future, ways which are complementary to the more ambitious programmes run within ESA and NASA. Of particular interest are multipoint measurements within the auroral acceleration region using clusters of microsatellites. New light-weight and compact instruments and deployment systems have been developed for the Astrid-2 mission. The payload will carry an integrated electric and magnetic field instrument, including a Langmuir probe, a lightweight ion and electron spectrometer, and two spin-scanning UV photometers for Lyman a and oxygen emissions in the aurora. The electric field probes will be deployed using a newly developed light-weight system for wire boom deployment. Other novel features to be used on Astrid-2 are data compression and data filtering. Astrid-2 is to be launched on a Kosmos vehicle from Plesetsk in 1997 into an 83 degrees inclination circular orbit at 1000 km altitude. The mission will use a geographically distributed ground station network for high-speed S-band data reception, one station to be located at Solna, Sweden and another at the South African Antarctic base SANAE.