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.