Student led mission to understand space weather

The Colorado Student Space Weather Experiment (CSSWE) is an NSF-funded 3U CubeSat (30×10×10 cm) which houses an energetic particle telescope.

Its primary objective is to measure the directional differential flux of Solar Energetic Protons (SEPs) and Earth’s radiation belt electrons.

CSSWE underwent a 22 day commissioning phase before taking 155 days of science data.  The CubeSat was thought to be inoperative when contact could not be reestablished after March 7th, 2013.  However, after 103 days of communication blackout, the CubeSat came back to life in a designed ‘Phoenix Mode’ on June 18th, 2013.  Despite the hiatus, the CubeSat was healthy enough to return to science mode (no beacons), which it did on June 27th, 2013.

As of December 22nd, 2014, the capacity of CSSWE’s batteries have degraded extensively; as a result CSSWE cannot be powered by them.  It is not clear if CSSWE can be powered exclusively by the solar cells.  Currently, CSSWE does not have enough power capacity to receive or transmit data.  Although the flight mission may be at an end, data analysis and modeling continue on a dataset that consists of 3.5 million points covering ~2 years.  The data is available through NASA’s CDAWeb archive by checking the “CubeSats” box.

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CSSWE NEWS

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July 8, 2024
CSSWE and CIRBE contributions in AGU Advances
An invited Commentary Article about CSSWE and CIRBE’s contributions to Energetic Particle Dynamics in the Near‐Earth Environment was published in AGU Advances: http://dx.doi.org/10.1029/2024AV001256
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May 9, 2020
Former Project Manager of CSSWE, Dr. Lauren Blum, Returns to CU Boulder as an Assistant Professor
Dr. Lauren Blum, a former Project Manager on CSSWE and PhD graduate (2014) from Dept of Aerospace Engineering Sciences, is returning to University of...
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May 9, 2019
CSSWE Presented at Capital Hill (again) on February 26, 2019
Prof. Xinlin Li was invited by USRA (Universities Space Research Association) to give a presentation and participate in a panel discussion in Capital Hill...
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