A Miniature Solar WInd Sensor (MSWIS) for future low-cost, constellation, and deep-space missions

Providing solar wind parameters is critical to understanding the physical processes related to space weather and their impacts at Earth and other planets. CubeSats are now capable and flexible platforms that can be configured for a wide range of science mission profiles, either as a standalone platform, as a daughter spacecraft, or in swarms and constellations. A Miniature Solar WInd Sensor (MSWIS) is an extremely compact, low-power, and high-performance solar wind analyzer to measure ion velocity distribution functions (VDFs) and determine bulk solar wind moments with accuracies comparable to state-of-the-art solar-wind sensors with minimal resources (1 U, 1.5 kg, 4.7 W).

The novel MSWIS design gives an energy per charge range of 100 eV/q to >10 keV/q with 5% resolution. The sensor total field of view covers 44° x 44° with 132, 4° x 4° sensor segments. Each segment points to different arrival directions, and MSWIS can instantaneously image the 2D (elevation x azimuth) distributions. Energy scan by sweeping a single internal electrode completes the 3D VDFs.

In this presentation, we discuss the sensor concept, the proof-of-concept model of MSWIS with laboratory verification study results, and the sensor packaging efforts to achieve the goal of 1U size. A compact and versatile solar wind sensor like MSWIS is very attractive for many future Heliophysics or Planetary missions, particularly for nanosatellite/multi-satellite platforms. Such instruments are also attractive for space weather, for inputs to modeling the space environment variability all around the Solar System and understanding the interactions of the solar wind and/or the magnetospheric environments in which they are embedded.