This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
This is a 2 year project to purchase and deploy 10 advanced GPS receivers. Pairs of receivers will be installed at three sites of the Magnetometer Array for Cusp and Cleft studies (MACCS) in Arctic Canada and at two lower latitude sites in Minnesota at Augsburg College, Minneapolis, Minnesota State University Moorhead. Co-location with the magnetometer array provides simultaneous coverage of magnetic and ionospheric phenomena over a common region which will yield important new results on, for example, ionospheric convection and scintillation. The instruments are also located within the region covered by SuperDARN, satellites such as THEMIS, and ionosondes, providing opportunities for extensive, multi-instrument studies which are proving essential for unraveling the complexities of solar wind-magnetosphere-ionosphere coupling. The GPS receivers will fill critical gaps in GPS data collection at high latitudes. The acquisition will provide the only known network of continuously operating scintillation monitoring receivers that will make data available to the public and available in near-real-time from at least one Arctic site.
The broader impacts of this project include significant extension of the ground-based observational infrastructure used by many space scientists worldwide; broad data dissemination that builds on a well-developed MACCS web server, and including undergraduate students in the research enterprise. The data reduction and analysis efforts associated with this project are highly suitable for undergraduate student research. Thus, the project will provide additional opportunities to expose undergraduate students to space physics, radio science, satellite navigation science and engineering, and signal propagation and processing, in particular via incorporation into senior-level advanced laboratory courses. Further, the project will strengthen a collaborative relationship between Augsburg College, Minnesota State University-Moorhead, and the Center for Remote Sensing Inc, a small business focused on scientific instrumentation.
