The FIREBIRD-II CubeSat Mission

Abstract

FIREBIRD-II (Focused Investigations of Relativistic Electron Burst Intensity, Range, and Dynamics) is a National Science Foundation CubeSat mission exploring relativistic electron microbursts. The mission consists of two identically instrumented CubeSats that were launched into a near polar orbit on January 31, 2015. Each spacecraft has two solid state detectors that return high cadence (10's of ms) measurements of the electron population. Both units operated continuously for almost 5 years and one unit continues to operate and return high quality data over 6 years after launch.