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Undergraduate Team Space Design
Competition L2 Space
Weather Monitoring Constellation
Future observatories such as NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and the ESA/NASA Hershel/Planck telescopes, are being placed away from Earth orbit, into heliocentric orbits at locations such as the second Lagrange point of the Sun-Earth system, L2 (see Figure 1). The advantages of L2 include a stable thermal environment, and low light pollution from Moon, Earth, or the Sun. However, these spacecraft must be placed into orbits around L2, since it is a quasi-stable gravitational point. Significant propulsion is needed to arrive at L2 and perform an orbit insertion maneuver. While a family of Lissajous orbits exists around L2, most observatories are scheduled to enter a long baseline halo orbit, some 100,000’s of km in semi-major axis. This means that the spacecraft may be entering and exiting the Earth’s magnetotail and magnetosheath. 
Figure 1: The second Lagrange point, L2, is located 1.5 million km in the anti-sun direction. Spacecrafts can execute semi-stable orbits around L2 with a few m/s of delta V for orbit correction per year. It is of great interest and need to characterize the radiation environment at L2, not only to understand the strength and extent, but more importantly, to understand the time variability of magnetotail. With no less than 5 major observatories scheduled to be at L2 in the coming decade, concerns about its radiation and space weather environment will only increase. In addition, there is also intrinsic scientific value in monitoring activities on the magnetotail. Interactions at the magnetotail causes charged plasmoids to travel back up the tail and interact with the Earth’s magnetosphere. |
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