Students amass eons of ions into project

UNM undergraduate research on lightning is creating a spark in the scientific community.
Students at the Configurable Space Microsystems Innovations & Applications Center (COSMIAC) are designing instruments that will be used to study ionospheric activity.

COSMIAC Director Steve Suddarth said the students are working on creating devices not available in the technological world.
“What we have been working on is the next generation of trying to measure how much of this ionization of upper atmospheric molecules is actually taking place,” he said. “We cannot find anything out there in the industry that has the performance of what they are designing in a lightweight package. These students have to be the first to do that.”

The ionosphere, an upper layer of the atmosphere named for its composition of charged ions, is involved in transmitting radio waves, Suddarth said.

“GPS signals have to go through the ionosphere to get to our receivers,” he said. “Depending on how much of that charging of this upper atmosphere has happened, those signals get bent and delayed by different amounts. When that happens that affects the accuracy of our GPS systems.”

Understanding ionospheric activity is essential to creating more reliable GPS systems, Suddarth said.
“There are military and all kinds of other reasons that we care about the accuracy of GPS,” he said.
“Knowing the condition of the ionosphere tells us a lot about the accuracy of systems like GPS. It could cause an airplane to fly into a mountain or a ship to run aground.”

Barry Crow, student researcher, said this project is the climax of everything they have learned in the electrical engineering field.
“Although other people have ventured down the same path, we are taking it a step further with a higher frequency range of lightning that we are trying to detect,” he said.

Lightning is the perfect tool to study upper atmospheric charge, Suddarth said.
“The way that we are trying to measure it is to use a signal that is naturally generated, which is lightning strikes,” he said. “You have a lightning strike that occurs down near the Earth or close to the Earth and you have a satellite that is up in the ionosphere. The signal from the lightning is received by the satellite, and looking at the signal from the satellite we can say something about how it got bent — affected by the ionosphere.”

Suddarth said the project will take place over three stages and multiple UNM student generations, the first of which is beginning this semester.
“Their job is to build the first generation of the instrument that is going to be launched on a tiny space craft,” he said. “The first stage is to simply build an instrument that works. This challenge is what I think is the most fun and exciting which is to start from a blank sheet of paper to come up with a design that I think is actually relatively complex.”

Some of the methods used for the research are unknown to even UNM instructors, Crow said, as they are creating instruments to be used in the future.
“The fun part comes in the ideas and implementation that we come up with,” he said. “Because of the nature of the project, we have been looking at unique pieces of hardware that some of our professors didn’t even know had been done.”