Constellation Observing System for Meteorology, Ionosphere, and Climate–-COSMIC: An Overview

Constellation Observing System for Meteorology, Ionosphere and Climate---COSMIC is a collaborative science project between the United States and Taiwan. The goal is to launch a constellation of eight small satellites in late 2002. The primary science payload is the latest version of the GPS flight receiver developed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Two secondary payloads are a Tiny Ionospheric Photometer (TIP), developed by the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) and a Tri-Band Beacon (TBB) transmitter, jointly developed by NRL and Applied Research Laboratory at the University of Texas. COSMIC will produce approximately 4,000 radio occultation sounding every day, in all weather and uniformly distributed around the globe. The TIP and TBB will provide ionospheric measurements that are highly complementary to the GPS occultation soundings. Recent scientific studies have indicated that these soundings and ionospheric measurements will be useful for a variety of weather, climate and ionosphere research and operational applications. COSMIC is a research and operational demonstration program designed to provide atmospheric and ionospheric data in near real time. These data will be provided openly and at the minimum cost of communication and reproduction. In this presentation, we will discuss the preliminary design of the COSMIC system and the program schedule.