SSUSI-Lite – A Powerful New Capability to Meet Space Weather Data Needs

The SSUSI (Special Sensor Ultraviolet Spectrographic Imager) instruments have been flying on DMSP for over a decade. During that time, a wealth of products have been developed to monitor a wide variety of space weather environmental parameters, including almost all of the space weather parameters identified as high priority by the MJSC 154-86 and various other official measurement requirements documents. These products have gone through a rigorous, independent validation and verification. The Air Force Weather Agency routinely makes these products available to its customers. Now we are in development of a new follow-on instrument, SSUSI-Lite, which takes advantage of new technology capable of providing all the current SSUSI products and more with lower mass, size, and power. During this presentation, we will review the capabilities of SSUSI and show how the SSUSI-Lite brings this capability down in cost and reduces the instrument size, mass and power requirements by a factor of 2.