COSMIC-2 Mission Overview and Status

We present FORMOSAT-7/COSMIC-2 (COSMIC-2) mission overview and the program status. COSMIC-2 is a program jointly managed by NOAA and NSPO. COSMIC-2 is a six satellite constellation in a 24-degree inclination orbit at a parking altitude about 720km. The mission design life of COSMIC-2 is 5-years and is supporting numerical weather prediction, space weather monitoring, and trending climate change. There are three instruments on each satellite. The primary instrument (mission payload) is the Tri-GNSS Radio-occultation System (TGRS) developed by JPL which produces more than 4000 Radio Occultation (RO) profiles per day. The secondary payloads are the Ion Velocity Meter (IVM) and tri-band Radio Frequency Beacon (RFB). On June 25, 2019, SpaceX successfully launched COSMIC-2 on Falcon Heavy rocket on the US Air Force STP-2 mission. At the time of the abstract submission, we have gone through early-orbit spacecraft and instrument checkout and are in the middle of the commissioning (verification of precise orbit determination, excess phase, and initial atmospheric retrievals). At the time of the conference, we expect to be nearing the completion of the neutral atmosphere calibration/validation phase, with provisional data products available to the public. Throughout its mission life, COSMIC-2 will provide neutral atmosphere data products (bending angle, refractivity, temperature, geopotential height profile) and ionosphere data products (total electron content, scintillation amplitude and phase indices, and electron density profiles).