Drag Effect of Kompsat-1 During Strong Solar and Geomagnetic Activity

In this paper, we analyze the orbital variation of the KOrea Multi-Purpose SATellite-1(KOMPSAT-1) in a strong space environment due to satellite drag by solar and geomagnetic activities. The satellite drag usually occurs slowly, but becomes serious satellite drag when the space environment suddenly changes via strong solar activity like a big flare eruption or coronal mass ejections(CMEs). Especially, KOMPSAT-1 as a low earth orbit satellite has a distinct increase of the drag acceleration by the variations of atmospheric friction. We consider factors of solar activity to have serious effects on the satellite drag from two points of view. One is an effect of high energy radiation when the flare occurs in the Sun. This radiation heats and expands the upper atmosphere of the Earth as the number of neutral particles is suddenly increased. The other is an effect of Joule and precipitating particle heating caused by current of plasma and precipitation of particles during geomagnetic storms by CMEs. It also affects the density of neutral particles by heating the upper atmosphere. We investigate the satellite drag acceleration associated with the two factors for five events selected based on solar and geomagnetic data from 2001 to 2002. The major results can be summarized as follows. First, the drag acceleration started to increase with solar EUV radiation with the best cross-correlation (r = 0.92) for 1 day delayed F10.7. Second, the drag acceleration and Dst index have similar patterns when the geomagnetic storm is dominant and the drag acceleration abruptly increases during the strong geomagnetic storm. Third, the background variation of the drag accelerations is governed by the solar radiation, while their short term (less than a day) variations is governed by geomagnetic storms.