Funded by the
European Space Agency, the
ROARS (Revealing Orbital and Atmospheric Responses to Solar activity) project is to investigate how a swarm of small satellites, known as CubeSats, flying in formation in low Earth orbit (LEO) just 500km above the Earth. They carry a comprehensive suite of scientific instruments designed to measure changes in satellite flight paths, to provide the “missing” set of measurements necessary to revolutionise our current understanding of satellite drag and collision risks caused by space weather and space debris. These include the latest inter-satellite laser communications and ranging, state-of-the art global navigation satellite systems (including GPS), atmospheric and magnetic field sensors.
ESA released the £86 million (€100 million) campaign for Innovative Mission Concepts Enabled by Swarms of CubeSats at the start of this year and received 74 submissions, from which seven were competitively selected for Phase 0 funding to develop their concepts towards a flight opportunity.
The ROARS mission, led by Universities of Warwick, has a 26 institution-strong consortium from across nine countries, including universities of Birmingham,
Northumbria, Bath, UCL, Stuttgart, Imperial and Calgary, alongside industrial partner, OpenCosmos, the National Centre for Atmospheric Research , USA, the Space Research Institute, Austria, and Southwest Research Institute in the USA.