Principal Investigator Kerri Cahoy
Understanding how both spacecraft and planetary atmospheres are affected by the variable influx of highly energetic particles from the Sun and from galactic sources. In addition to the everyday hazards of energetic particles trapped by Earth’s magnetic field in the Van Allen Radiation belts, solar storms and the effects of weapons at orbital altitudes produce increased radiation fluxes that disrupt and damage valuable commercial, defense, and scientific satellites. Gaining access to commercial, defense, and scientific spacecraft telemetry and anomaly databases and correlating these data with space weather sensor observations provides insight on how to predict and prepare for severe space weather. These data also provide an opportunity to investigate the sensitivity of different standard spacecraft components (such as power amplifiers, solar arrays, and photodetectors) to energetic particle fluxes, and how observations of space weather events made with standard components can augment observations made with dedicated space weather instruments. Spacecraft radio systems can also be used to measure atmospheric and ionospheric profiles using a technique called radio occultation. Ionospheric profiles can measure the effect of solar activity on the charged particles in planetary upper atmospheres. Atmospheric profiles are of temperature and pressure, and contribute to studies of planetary climate and weather. Developing multi-frequency radio occultation systems that can provide high vertical resolution profiles of humidity and concentrations of other atmospheric species would make valuable contributions to weather and climate models.
Professor Cahoy’s work on using geostationary communications satellites as space weather sensors was selected by the Air Force Office of Sponsored Research for a 2013 Young Investigator grant.