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Science Missions with CubeSats Sure are Fun! The Story of the MinXSS CubeSats
Speaker: Thomas Woods, Laboratory for Atmospheric & Space Physics (LASP), University of Colorado Boulder
Wednesday, May 19, 2021
10:00AM-11:00AM Pacific Daylight Time
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Abstract: Fifteen years ago I and many others considered CubeSats only as an educational tool. How could one do real science with an object about the size of a loaf of bread? Remarkably, the disruptive technology revolution for CubeSats over the past several years has been a game changer to enable science missions with CubeSats.
I’ll share the stories of how the Miniature X-ray Solar Spectrometer (MinXSS) experiment was started as a student class project at the University of Colorado, how it was developed into a 3-Unit (3U) CubeSat as a science mission for NASA, and how it exceeded all our expectations for educational purpose, technology demonstration, and science advancement. More than 50 students have worked on the MinXSS project. MinXSS has demonstrated improved instrument technology for observing the solar X-ray spectrum, and MinXSS-1 was the first to fly the 0.5U attitude control system from Blue Canyon Technologies. MinXSS has advanced solar physics for understanding the highly energetic and ever changing corona and filled spectral gaps in the solar spectrum as desperately needed for research about Earth’s ionosphere and thermosphere.
Bio: Dr. Thomas Woods is a Senior Research Scientist at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at the University of Colorado in Boulder. He obtained his BS in Physics in 1981 from Southwestern at Memphis (now Rhodes College) and his PhD in Physics in 1985 from the Johns Hopkins University. His research is focused primarily on the solar ultraviolet irradiance and its effects on Earth’s atmosphere, climate change, and space weather. Dr. Woods is involved with several NASA and NOAA satellite programs. He is the Principal Investigator (PI) of the TIMED SEE, SDO EVE, and TSIS-1 satellite instrument programs at LASP and is also the PI of the SORCE mission and MinXSS CubeSats.
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