The Experiment for Space Radiation Analysis (ESRA) is the next in the series of Demonstration and Validation (DemVal) projects the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) program will fly. The ESRA program will mature technologies such as the novel Wide-field-of-view Plasma Spectrometer (WPS) and the Energetic Charged Particle (ECP) telescope, along with high voltage power supply, a 3U Eurocard single board computers, flight software architecture, and analog-to-digital electronics. The WPS and ECP sensors are intended to actively monitor the local space environment, thus allowing for the attribution and rapid anomaly resolution of unanticipated instrument or spacecraft behavior as a result of space weather effects. The Autonomous Ion Mass Spectrometer Sentry (AIMSS) is a high-resolution ion mass spectrometer designed to make observations of low-energy space plasmas in planetary ionospheres. Additionally, AIMSS is capable of measuring charge exchange ions due to the interaction of spacecraft thruster plumes and the ionospheric plasma as they deliver supplies and crew the International Space Station (ISS). The particles expelled by thruster systems cause contamination of space station surfaces that degrade optical and thermal surfaces along with causing increased spacecraft surface charging.

The Experiment for Space Radiation Analysis (ESRA) is the next in the series of Demonstration and Validation (DemVal) projects the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) program will fly. The ESRA program will mature technologies such as the novel Wide-field-of-view Plasma Spectrometer (WPS) and the Energetic Charged Particle (ECP) telescope, along with high voltage power supply, a 3U Eurocard single board computers, flight software architecture, and analog-to-digital electronics. The WPS and ECP sensors are intended to actively monitor the local space environment, thus allowing for the attribution and rapid anomaly resolution of unanticipated instrument or spacecraft behavior as a result of space weather effects.

Technical staff at the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Intelligence and Space Research Division have developed a system that supports high resolution 2D imaging spectrometry applications and operates at rates up to 100 kHz event rate in the stressing space environments of geostationary transfer orbit (GTO). Specifically, spacecraft systems operating through GTO will traverse the Earth’s radiation belts twice per day and be subjected to the highly dynamic and energetic trapped charged particle populations. In addition to discussing the strategies for designing this instrument to meet radiation hardness requirements, we will discuss the approach to designing a low size, weight, and power (SWaP) 2D imager through an innovative approach to interfacing a micro-channel plate (MCP) and cross delay line (XDL) anode. Enabling CubeSat class satellites to implement spectrometry is valuable to the scientific community, presenting a need for designing ultra-low SWaP instruments for these applications that possess limited resources and budget. In this paper, we will provide a detailed overview of the various aspects of our 2D imaging system, design decisions, challenges, and discuss potential applications to other space-flight spectrometry missions. This design is scheduled to fly on the Experiment for Space Radiation Analysis (ESRA) CubeSat mission to GTO and the Autonomous Ion Mass Spectrometer Sentry (AIMSS) to the International Space Station.

The Experiment for Space Radiation Analysis (ESRA) is the next in the series of Demonstration and Validation (DemVal) projects the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) program will fly. The ESRA program will mature technologies such as the novel Wide-field-of-view Plasma Spectrometer (WPS) and the Energetic Charged Particle (ECP) telescope, along with high voltage power supply, a 3U Eurocard single board computers, flight software architecture, and analog-to-digital electronics. The WPS and ECP sensors are intended to actively monitor the local space environment, thus allowing for the attribution and rapid anomaly resolution of unanticipated instrument or spacecraft behavior as a result of space weather effects.

The experiment for space radiation analysis is an upcoming project for Los Alamos National Laboratory. This 12U CubeSat will be placed in a geosynchronous transfer orbit to make measurements of the charged particle populations in the radiation belts. Currently, there are no data from CubeSats operating in the radiation belts, and although the GTOsat will soon be operating in the radiation belts, this is an active space for CubeSat development. The energetic charged particle sensor on board the experiment for space radiation analysis is a particle telescope which will test and mature new technologies for use in space missions. The energy range of interest for the energetic charged particle sensor is from 100 keV to 1000 MeV for protons, and from 100 keV to 20 MeV for electrons.

The Experiment for Space Radiation Analysis (ESRA) is the next in the series of Demonstration and Validation (DemVal) projects the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) program will fly. The ESRA program will mature technologies such as the novel Wide-field-of-view Plasma Spectrometer (WPS) and the Energetic Charged Particle (ECP) telescope, along with high voltage power supply, a 3U Eurocard single board computers, flight software architecture, and analog-to-digital electronics. The WPS and ECP sensors are intended to actively monitor the local space environment, thus allowing for the attribution and rapid anomaly resolution of unanticipated instrument or spacecraft behavior as a result of space weather effects.

The Compact Ion Mass Spectrometer (CIMS) is a highly compact ion mass spectrometer capable of high-mass resolution for low-energy space plasma.CIMS is capable of measuring flux, energy, and mass of ions providing unique measurements of the ionospheric outflow and cold plasma in the magnetosphere.Measurements of the ionospheric outflow and cold-magnetospheric ion population will provide the necessary initial conditions of the ion populations that drive some magnetosphere-ionosphere (MI) coupling processes along with magnetospheric ion composition and dynamics.Simultaneous measurements of the cold and