Transition Region Explorer (TREx)
Transition Region Explorer (TREx) is a CFI-funded project and aims to be the world's foremost auroral imaging facility for remote sensing the near-Earth space environment. The project consists of the development and deployment of an extensive ground-based network of sophisticated optical and radio instrumentation across Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and the Northwest Territories.
The TREx project will design and deploy the following instruments:
- 6 blue-line all-sky imagers (3s-30Hz cadence)
- 6 RGB colour all-sky imagers (3s cadence)
- 6 Near-Infrared all-sky imagers (6s cadence)
- 10 Imaging Riometers (1s-100Hz cadence - operations project is GO-IRIS)
- 2 Proton Aurora Meridian Imaging Spectographs (15s cadence)
- 13 Global Navigation Satellite System receiver systems (GNSS)
In partnership with IBM, TREx will include sensor web technology to autonomously control and coordinate sensor behaviour across the observational region. This architecture will allow TREx to produce the first high resolution data (estimated at 120 TB of data per year) over a region large enough to study multi-scale coupling of key physical processes in the space environment.