CU Boulder professor Xinlin Li holds up a model of the CSSWE cube satellite that studied energetic particles in Earth's magnetosphere. Credit: LASP.

Researchers at University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder) in the US are set to study Earth’s inner radiation belt with the help of a shoebox-sized cube satellite.

The $4m Cubesat: Inner Radiation Belt Experiment (CIRBE) mission will be developed as part of a Nasa-funded mission.

Scheduled to be launched by 2021, CIRBE will be designed to provide advanced resolution of one of Earth’s two Van Allen belts. These are a zone that traps energetic particles in the planet’s magnetic field.

This powerful radiation poses a risk to solar panels, electronic circuitry, and other hardware aboard spacecraft operating at and beyond a low Earth orbit, as well as spacewalking astronauts.

“Development of CIRBE is set to be helped by the success of the Colorado Student Space Weather Experiment.”

CU Boulder Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics professor and the project’s principal investigator Xinlin Li said: “CIRBE will provide sophisticated, fine-grain measurements of this Van Allen belt like never before.

“We will study the distribution of these particles and how they become so energised.”

Colorado’s aerospace industry, including Blue Canyon Technologies, will be involved in the development of the CIRBE mission. Blue Canyon will build the cube satellite’s bus system.

The mission’s overall system design, development, integration, operation, and modeling will be conducted at CU by the Ann and H J Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences (AES) and LASP faculties, engineers and graduate students.

It will also involve a partnership with the US Air Force Research Laboratory and Nasa’s Goddard Spaceflight Center.

Development of CIRBE is set to be helped by the success of the Colorado Student Space Weather Experiment (CSSWE). It is a cube satellite developed by CU Boulder researchers that was launched in 2012 to study the Van Allen belt.

The mission operated for over two years. It provided data that were used in over 21 peer-reviewed publications in major scientific journals, including Nature. It also helped solve a longstanding astronomical mystery.