MinXSS

Solar eruptive event is a classification encompassing several types of energetic release from the coronal magnetic fields. The longest studied of these, solar flares, were first observed by Carrington and Hodgson in 1859. Despite many decades of study and an ever-increasing number and precision of observations, many questions remain: How is an eruptive event powered? What triggers it? How is the energy distributed before, during, and after an eruption? How does that energy impact the Earth’s atmosphere?

 science objective of the MinXSS CubeSat is to better understand the solar irradiance energy distribution of solar flare soft X-ray (SXR) emission and its impact on Earth’s ionosphere, thermosphere, and mesosphere (ITM). Energy from SXR radiation is deposited mostly in the ionospheric E-region, from ~80 to ~150 km, but the altitude is strongly dependent on the SXR spectrum because of the steep slope and structure of the photoionization cross sections of atmospheric gases in this wavelength range.

The LASP cubesat mission operations and data systems teams provided the commanding, downlink, data capture and data reduction for MinXSS-1,2 operations.

MinXSS data products are publicly available.
https://lasp.colorado.edu/minxss/data/