The trio becomes a quartet

The trio becomes a quartet

The Canadian satellite Cassiope transfers an e-POP consisting of 8 instruments to obtain information about the Earth’s ionosphere, the thermosphere, and the Earth’s magnetosphere. This will allow a better understanding of the cosmic weather.

To provide the best possible use of existing satellites, ESA and Canada made a deal that turned the Swarm mission into 4 satellites. This will provide more information about space weather and phenomena like the northern lights.

Since 2013, there are 3 identical ESA Swarm satellites in orbit, which return a huge amount of data on how the earth's magnetic field is generated and how it protects us from dangerous electrically charged atomic particles in the solar wind.

The Canadian Cassiope satellite contains 3 instrument packages, one of which is an electronic POP. He gets information about space weather. Therefore, mission representatives began to study how to work together to maximize efficiency.

It turned out that the Cassiope orbit is ideally suited to the proportion of improved Swarm readings. Thanks to international collaboration, e-POP actually became the fourth element of the Swarm mission. He joined the Alpha, Bravo and Charlie satellites.

The trio becomes a quartet

The ESA Swarm mission was used to improve the understanding of the vast layers of electrical current in the upper atmosphere. Birkeland currents carry up to 1 TW of electricity to the upper atmospheric layer — 30 times more energy than the heat wave consumed in New York.

Many scientists are interested in using e-POP in the Swarm mission, as this will provide more data and explore the complex dynamics of space weather. This integration will allow a lot of new scientific research on the binding of the magnetosphere and the ionosphere, including the terrestrial magnetic field and the dynamics of the upper atmospheric layers.

This important achievement confirms the significant role of the ESET program, which provides a link between various missions and facilitates international cooperation. Now, e-POP will change its name to Echo, but will continue to receive data for its original research.

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