The Lifetime of a CubeSat

As part of NASA's IMAP Student Collaboration, students from Sonoma State University, Howard University, and the University of New Hampshire are working on CubeSats to be launched by NASA in 2024. Our goal is to send at least one 2U CubeSat to the ionosphere to measure the extreme ultraviolet light from OI 135.6-nm and the thermal electrons in the auroral zone to find out how the upwelling of the polar thermosphere is affected by the solar wind. We plan to study this upwelling in the cusp region of the magnetosphere. In order to do this study, the orbit has to be a polar orbit. We are studying how long a CubeSat will stay in orbit given the expected changes to the atmosphere due to the solar 10.7-cm fluxes. I have developed Logo computer code to model solar 10.7-cm flux effects on the orbital lifetime and will present results from this code that are relevant to this CubeSat project.

This work was supported by a grant to Sonoma State University as part of NASA's IMAP Student Collaboration project led by University of New Hampshire, grant number 80NSSC20K1110. I also acknowledge mentoring by Dr. Laura Peticolas, and Dr. J. Garrett Jernigan.