Three science instruments launched in 1998 aboard a $5 million satellite designed and built by CU-Boulder students, faculty and engineers are returning a treasure trove of valuable data, according to project scientists.
Called the Student Nitric Oxide Explorer, or SNOE, the satellite carries an ultraviolet spectrometer and two photometers to measure nitric oxide in the upper atmosphere, X-rays from the sun and light from the Earth's aurora. Nitric oxide is a small but reactive component of the upper atmosphere that affects the temperature and density of near-Earth space and may be important to the chemistry of the ozone layer, said Stan Solomon, deputy investigator on the project.
Developed at CU-Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, the NASA mission is being controlled from LASP聮s Research Park facility in Boulder 24 hours a day by students and faculty.
The design and construction phase involved about 110 CU-Boulder students, primarily undergraduates, said Solomon, who is coordinating the SNOE effort with principal investigator and LASP Professor Charles Barth. The $5 million includes the cost of the spacecraft, instruments and mission operations.
"SNOE is functioning perfectly on-orbit at the beginning of its third year, and continues to be controlled by students and engineers at the LASP Space Technology Building," said Solomon. "Data analysis continues, with three papers appearing in Geophysical Research Letters last year, another just submitted to the Journal of Geophysical Research, and more on the way."
The latest paper announces findings of unexpectedly high levels of solar X-rays during the rise to the current solar maximum. Large amounts of nitric oxide in the polar and mid-latitude regions have been observed during auroral storms, Solomon said.
SNOE is only the second NASA satellite to be entirely operated and controlled by a university. The first, the Solar Mesosphere Explorer satellite, which gathered data on ozone and solar radiation variability from 1981 to 1988, also was controlled from CU.
The students tapped into the expertise of engineers from LASP, Ball Aerospace Corp. of Boulder and the National Center for Atmospheric Research, working with them in all phases of the project. The original goals of the initiative were to demonstrate the feasibility of designing and building small, relatively low-cost spacecraft that could accomplish beneficial science and include significant student participation, said Solomon.
"The people who dreamed up NASA聮s Student Explorer program remember the dawn of the space age, when spacecraft could be built and launched swiftly and cheaply with direct student involvement," he said. "We wanted to capture some of that magic, and we think we have."
The three-foot diameter, 250-pound spacecraft was launched on a 55-foot-long Pegasus expendable-launch vehicle. The mission operations phase is supported in part by a special excellence award from the Colorado Commission on Higher Education.
"It was an amazing experience to actually work on a satellite," says aerospace engineering graduate student Aimee Merkel, the project leader on the UV spectrograph who began on the SNOE project as an undergraduate. "I think we all have a great sense of accomplishment and satisfaction."
The majority of undergraduates participating in the SNOE project and the Colorado Space Grant Consortium space missions originating at CU-Boulder are aerospace engineering science majors. Considered to be among the elite aerospace engineering programs in the nation, CU-Boulder聮s department is believed to provide more hands-on experience for undergraduates in designing, building and flying space instruments than any university in the world.
In addition, the astrophysical and planetary sciences department at CU-Boulder is expected to begin offering an undergraduate major in fall 2000, significantly strengthening the already formidable undergraduate space education and research on campus. APS, currently noted for its exceptional graduate student and faculty research, was ranked 12th in the nation and 5th among public universities in the most recent National Research Council survey, said APS chair Michael Shull.