PlanetiQ Observations of Total Electron Content and Ionospheric Scintillations

PlanetiQ is flying state-of-the-art GNSS receivers on smallsats acquiring radio occultation (RO) data through the ionosphere and neutral atmosphere from the 4 major GNSS constellations: GPS, GLONASS, Galileo and BeiDou-3. These receivers track all GNSS satellites above the Earth’s limb and provide pole to pole coverage of the ionosphere. We have thus far acquired more than 2 million RO profiles of the atmosphere and ionosphere beginning September 2021. We presently have two 2 satellites producing approximately 5400 ionospheric RO per day with pole-to-pole coverage. Our next satellite, scheduled to launch in Feb 2025, will increase this to approximately 8100 ionospheric RO per day. We have been providing data to NASA and NOAA and participated in the NOAA Space weather pilot.

The two primary ionospheric data types are total electron content (TEC) and scintillations. We have developed and will describe and demonstrate our calibration capability to estimate and remove the effects of local multipath and transmitter and receiver differential code biases (DCB) on the TEC observations.

Regarding scintillations, each receiver continually generates and reports the amplitude and phase scintillation statistics, S4 and sigma phi, from all GNSS satellites being tracked to determine when and where ionospheric scintillations are occurring. When scintillations are detected and the tangent point of the signal path is above 120 km altitude, the receiver downlinks 50 Hz high rate complex samples of the carrier signal that are used in ground processing to geolocate where the small scale turbulent ionospheric structure is located along the signal path that is causing the scintillations.

Because the ionosphere evolves so rapidly, data latency is a key capability. Our average latency is presently about 35 minutes. We have a design of a new satellite to satellite data link that can reduce latency to approximately 10 minutes if there is sufficient demand for it.

We will present a summary of our capabilities and results including from the May 2024 Gannon Storm.