The ionospheric exploration based on TJU#01 meteorological microsatellite mission: Initial results

Abstract

The global navigation satellite system radio occultation technique is achieving increasing significance and extensive promotion in the remote sensing of near-earth atmosphere, climate, and ionosphere in recent three decades. Nowadays, many communities become interested in developing commercial mode in occultation measurement by launching massive nano- or cube satellite constellations at low costs. The TJU#01 is the first meteorological satellite of Tianjin Yunyao Aerospace Technology Co., Ltd. which was successfully launched into space on 7 December 2021. The occultation antenna onboard the satellite is able to probe both the ionosphere and atmosphere at multi-frequencies including GPS, GLONASS, and BEIDOU systems. The microsatellite applies the same occultation antenna to receive both the atmospheric and ionospheric occultations at 100 and 1 Hz respectively. 100 Hz narrow band power and wide band power data are downloaded to the ground to generate high-rate signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) series and applied to ionospheric scintillation exploration. In this paper, the primary parameters of the satellite and occultation antenna are introduced, as well as the ionospheric data processing methodologies. The initial ionospheric products of TJU#01 are evaluated after one-month in orbit. The TJU#01 results have a good agreement with the co-located ground ionosonde data and COSMIC-2 observations. The new satellite and its follow-on missions have great capabilities and potentials in the ionospheric and space weather researches.