The L5 mission for space weather forecasting

Abstract We have studied a number of interplanetary space mission scenarios for space weather research and operational forecasting experiments and concluded that a spacecraft should be deployed at the L5 point of the Sun–Earth system to enable remote sensing of the Sun and interplanetary space and in situ measurements of solar wind plasma and high energy solar particle events. The L5 point is an appropriate position for making side-view observations of geo-effective coronal mass ejections and interplanetary plasma clouds. Here, we describe briefly the mission plan and the ongoing BBM development of important subsystems such as the wide field coronal imager (WCI) and the mission processor. The WCI will have a large CCD array with 16-bit sampling, to achieve a dynamic range of several thousand in order to detect very small deviations due to plasma clouds under zodiacal light contaminations a hundred times brighter than the clouds. The L5 mission we propose will surely contribute to the construction of an international space weather observation network.