The Mission

AMICal Sat is a student satellite dedicated to space weather purpose. It will monitor the auroral oval almost during each orbit. In details, it will take pictures of the aurora once at the limb to allow to get the vertical structures of the oval, once at the nadir the map the portion of the oval seen by the satellite .

Scientifically the data will be used to reconstruct the flux of particles coming into the atmosphere especially the electrons in the range of 20eV-10keV.

Different levels of data will be: Raw images Recolored images Calibrated images Flux reconstruction

The flux reconstruction uses the Transsolo code, a kinetic code dedicate to the calculation of the particle deposition into the atmosphere (Lilensten et Blelly 2002 Vialatte et al. 2017). The code includes the MSIS90 code or the IRI code for the initial atmospheric model, including electron densities. Taking the energetic flux as input, it calculates the light emissions and some other parameters like ionization rates in the ionosphere. An increase in these ionization, will increase the total electron content (TEC) and thus can change the cut off frequency of the ionosphere.

The AMICal Sat data will allow to reconstruct the energetic inputs for the registered light emission. The limb data allowing to give the precise vertical structure and the limb data to get the map of the oval.

These data will not be available in real time. They need to be downloaded once or twice per day. Then multiple run of the code will be done. At this stage (Aug 2019) the reconstruction of the fluxes of a work in progress. A PhD student is currently working on this topic.

However first reconstruction can be done “by hand” at this stage on demand of one or several members of the radio amateur community. It will necessitate multiple runs of the code using the AMICal Sat data .