3 Conclusions and Recommendations
As the market and demand for SmallSats grow and their use becomes more
commonplace, these platforms become more capable for implementing space
weather research and operations in regions of parameter space that can
be entirely inaccessible by traditional larger missions, and at lower
cost. Much of this advancement has, to date, been driven by the
commercial market, but is typically sponsored by grants or contracts
from government agencies. These agencies should continue to recognize
the need for innovation and sponsorship of opportunities in this growing
market. However, sharing technological advancements between different
nations is complicated by the challenges outlined above. These will need
to be overcome to enable increased international collaborations in
SmallSat-driven space weather research and operations.
The challenges described in this commentary point to the need for a
permanent international working group to coordinate efforts, produce and
maintain a list of best practices for SmallSat developers, and recommend
regulations that will guide future SmallSat operations. Schrijver et al.
(2015) developed a space weather roadmap including recommendations for
future Smallsat-based space weather observations. Following from this,
COSPAR commissioned an international study group to construct a SmallSat
Roadmap (Millan et al., 2019). Recommendations were aimed at scientists,
industry, space agencies, policy makers, and COSPAR, with an
underpinning aim of increasing exploitation of SmallSats, and increasing
flexibility to ensure their application to space weather. They suggest
COSPAR could facilitate international teams to come together like in the
QB50 project (e.g., Gill et al., 2013) to meet large-scale science goals
via SmallSat constellation missions. This is not inconsistent with our
recommendation for an international working group, but misses our
further aim of enabling SmallSats to ultimately benefit providers of
operational space weather services and the end users of such services.
As discussed in the companion paper by Verkhoglyadova et al. (2020), the
WMO produces requirements for space weather observations with an
emphasis on near-real-time operations. The existing observational
network is regularly assessed against these requirements to identify
gaps in provision and to advocate for developments in the network. These
efforts need to be better coordinated with other groups of observation
providers, such as the Coordination Group for Meteorological Satellites
(CGMS), and the SmallSat community, especially since the gaps between
provision and requirements are currently often very large.
Another goal of this improved coordination is to better publicize
operational space weather observational needs. A longer-term aim is to
strike a balance between the WMO requirements – designed to meet the
needs of the users of operational space weather services rather than
necessarily being linked to upcoming observational developments – and
research into new observational methods being carried out by the
SmallSat community and other researchers. This balance is essential to
ensure a strong connection between research and operations, to enable a
pathway for continual research-to-operations developments, and to
minimize the risk of lack of engagement (e.g., via the researchers
dismissing the WMO requirements as being too challenging). An effective
way of achieving this connection is for our proposed working group to
organize a research-to-operations observations workshop, jointly
sponsored by stakeholder agencies worldwide.