The World’s Smallest All-In-One Space Probe, “Advanced Ionospheric Probe”, Developed by NCU
Under the Ministry of Education, support and funding of “Moving Toward Excellent Universities” Associate Professor Chi-Kuang Chao led the Space Payload Laboratory of Graduate Institute of Space Science, NCU in developing the world’s smallest all-in-one space plasma sensor, the “Advanced Ionospheric Probe (AIP)” in three years.
The AIP is ready to deploy in space together with the Taiwan FORMOSAT-5 satellite in 2016Q1 for exploration of space weather and as seismic precursors to strong earthquakes. The AIP is also nicknamed as “Space Cube” for its similarity to a Magic Cube because its sensor is a palm-sized metal cube with side length 10-cm. Besides its miniature size, the cube also has first-class sampling rate up to 8,192 S/s to resolve fine structure of ionospheric plasma irregularities. As Taiwan is located in the low-latitude ionosphere and close to the equatorial ionization anomaly region, plasma irregularities occur frequently to cause radio or GPS interference. Both national defense and marine radio communications can benefit from understanding the complicated nature of the ionosphere.
Another feature of the AIP is capable to collect complete characteristics of ionospheric plasma (like plasma concentrations, velocities, and temperatures). According to Professor Chao, normal detectors only measure one or two parameters, but the AIP can collect the complete dataset in a time-sharing way. In recent decades it is a hot research topic to use ionospheric parameters to predict earthquakes. However, this is still a mystery why the ionosphere will be affected before earthquakes occur. AIP can capture all the ionospheric perturbations caused by strong earthquakes in the future and plays an important role in revealing the secrets of the earthquakes for all mankind.
