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Mission

SOCON

The goal of the program is to construct and demonstrate the potential scientific applications of two high resolution (~120m) ocean color instruments to be carried by two 3U (10cm x 10cm x 30cm) CubeSat Platforms.

They are called ACC Clyde (Scotland) provided the CubeSat bus named SeaHawk and Cloudland Instruments (California) provided the Hawkeye Sensor.

Mission Summary

  • The Program was funded in 2014 by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.
  • The program is administered by Dr. John Morrison – UNCW.
  • NASA provided “advice and review” during the development phase and with formal NASA/HQ Space Act Agreement (2017), will provide services for the collection, processing, calibration, validation, archive and distribution of the data.
  • A second Moore Foundation grant was awarded in 2017 to provide the funds for another commercial launch for the second CubeSAT and operations of both spacecraft and instruments for a duration of 2 years each.
  • In 2021, the University of Georgia Skidaway Institute of Oceanography joint the team, Dr. Sara Rivero-Calle's team will be co-leading the Science Program and Mission Management.

Key Mission Parameters

  1. Launched December 3rd 2018
  2. Nominal orbital height = 575 km
  3. Sun-synchronous around 10:30am
  4. 9-day repeat orbit
  5. Baseline orbital lifetime of 1 year (18-24 month)
  6. Baseline of 15 scenes per day (200 x 600km of approximately 120 meter resolution - 100MB/scene)
  7. X-band downlink (Wallops & Alaska) data rate of 6 --> 100mbps
  8. Weight of instrument less than 1 kilogram
  9. Total weight of spacecraft plus instrument less than 5 kilograms
  10. Off-the-shelf CCD arrays used
  11. Sensitivity comparable to SeaWiFS
  12. Open intellectual property and knowledge sharing

Additional Information

Project Partners

Helpful UNCW Links

Helpful CubeSAT Links