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An Undergraduate Student Instrumentation Project to Develop Instruments Study the Auroral Ionosphere and Stratospheric Ozone Layer Using Lightweight Balloon Payloads
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This educational paper describes a NASA-funded undergraduate student instrumentation project at the University of Houston developing balloon-borne instruments to study the auroral ionosphere and stratospheric ozone. Students in STEM majors designed, built, and flew scientific payloads, gaining hands-on research experience.
View Video Presentation: https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2022-0931.vid The Undergraduate Student Instrumentation (USIP) project at University of Houston (UH) is an educational initiative released by the NASA Science Mission Directorate that aims at engaging undergraduate students in the process of developing Earth and space science instruments for use in balloon borne atmospheric science and Geospace investigations in the auroral zone. The initiative engages undergraduate students in STEM related majors in a full-fledged, hands-on project while simultaneously developing technical and project management skills that will be necessary in their future careers. The mission of the UH USIP is to design, build, and fly instruments on-board high-altitude latex balloons to study atmospheric and auroral phenomena near the arctic circle. The campaign that will be discussed in this paper is the fourth USIP iteration. The instruments designed by this USIP group include a Very Low, medium, and High radio frequency receiver, a digital to analog IRIG-B Time Code encoder, an atmospheric extremophile and microplastics organism collection device, an atmospheric conductivity detector, High Energy Particles, various Gaseous Compound detectors, and a drone time-of-flight UAV Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR).
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