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Yes, a 60-year-old mystery in space physicsresolved,thanks to our first CubeSat (CSSWE) measurements

Xinlin Li (李炘璘)

Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics(LASP), Annand H. J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences (AES), Universityof Colorado Boulder

Ourfirst CubeSat: Colorado Student Space Weather Experiment (CSSWE), funded byNSF, launched on September 13th, 2012 and operated more than twoyears, has been a tremendous success in Education, Engineering, and Sciences. More than 65 students have workedon this project, with mentoring and supervision from AES faculty and LASPengineers. Five Ph.D. dissertations are closely related to this mission, andthere have been 21 peer-reviewed papers associated with CSSWE published, withabout one-third of them being engineering research papers and two-thirdsscience research papers. Recently, we have resolved a 60-year-old mystery regarding thesource population of inner radiation belt electrons solely based on the measurements of Relativistic Electron and Proton Telescope integrated littleexperiment (REPTile), the sole science payload onboard. The results were published inNaturein December 2017 [1], leading toa wealth of media, national and international, coverage.

Inthis presentation, I will first review the engineering endeavor leading to thecompletion of CubeSat systems and then describe the data analysis effortleading to the most recent publication inNature,in which we show direct measurements of relativistic electrons near the inneredge of the inner radiation belt and demonstrate, for the first time, that themain source of these electrons is cosmic-ray albedo neutron decay (CRAND), andthat this CRAND process also contributes to electrons elsewhere in the innermagnetosphere. Finally, I will briefly describe our next generation of REPTileand CubeSat, recently funded by NASA, to make the cleanest measurements ofinner belt electrons in the near future.

[1] Li, Xinlin, Richard Selesnick, QuintinSchiller, Kun Zhang, Hong Zhao, Daniel Baker, and Michael Temerin (2017),Measurementof electrons from albedo neutron decay and neutron density in near-Earth space,Nature552, 382-385,doi:10.1038/nature24642.

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