  The 3UCubed project is a 3U CubeSat being jointly developed by the University
of New Hampshire, Sonoma State University, and Howard University as a part of
the NASA Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe, IMAP, student
collaboration. This project comprises of a multidisciplinary team of
undergraduate students from all three universities. The mission goal of the
3UCubed is to understand how Earths polar upper atmosphere the thermosphere in
Earths auroral regions, responds to particle precipitation and solar wind
forcing, and internal magnetospheric processes.
  3UCubed includes two instruments with rocket heritage to achieve the science
mission: an ultraviolet photomultiplier tube, UVPMT, and an electron retarding
potential analyzer ERPA. The spacecraft bus consists of the following
subsystems: Attitude Determination and Control, Command and Data Handling,
Power, Communication, Structural, and Thermal.
  Currently, the project is in the post-PDR stage, starting to build and test
engineering models to develop a FlatSat prior to critical design review in
2023. The goal is to launch at least one 3U CubeSat to collect science data
close to the anticipated peak of Solar Cycle 25 around July 2025. Our mother
mission, IMAP, is also projected to launch in 2025, which will let us jointly
analyze the science data of the main mission, providing the solar wind
measurements and inputs to the magnetosphere with that of 3UCubed, providing
the response of Earths cusp to these inputs.
