COSMIAC is working under sponsorship of the National Science Foundation's Research for Engineering Undergraduates (REU) program to develop research interest for undergraduates.

DotSat Ionospheric RF Dispersion Instrument

When radio signals hit the earth's ionosphere, they are bent in a fashion that either reflects them or can cause them to be delayed depending upon frequency.  This is particularly important for GPS systems because they must transit the ionosphere to reach the earth, and because their timing is critical to ensure GPS accuracy.
COSMIAC is currently designing an tiny, very inexpensive instrument that will allow scientists to make detailed soundings of the ionosphere using signals from natural transients such as lightning storms.  The work is sponsored by  the National Science Foundation's Research experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program.
Science Goals:

DotSat is intended to shed light on:

	Total Electron Content (TEC), magnetic field strength, refractive effects, plasma properties, and higher-order electron density profile effects;
	Relationships between lightning effects and thunderstorm weather in the troposphere; and
	The potential relationship between the acoustic/seismic events around thunderstorms and ionospheric weather.

What's Unique about DotSat
Previous missions have made measurements on ionospheric dispersion by observing RF signals from lightning and other transients.  Although they were much higher quality instruments than DotSat, they could not locate the source of the lightning observed and therefore could not determine the entire geometry to solve for the ionospheric effects.  DotSat will change this completely by using an array of low-cost detectors with precision timing, some on the ground and one in space.  These will be used to reference geometrical information for the space-based spectrometer that will make the key soundings.  The result will be a complete view of the dispersion process.
The REU Team

	Receiver design,
	High-speed ADC and digital board design
	FPGA Design,
	Microcontroller programming,
	Circuit analysis,
	Antenna design,
	DSP processing,
	Filter design,
	Power,
	Communications.

Phases
This activity will last for three years and is in the process of completing the first phase this summer (2010).  The first year goals concern simply making a small, low-cost RF spectrometer system that can capture time domain data in the range of 20-200MHz.  The second year will focus on repackaging the system for a suitable ground system that can be replicated.  The third year will make the system into flight hardware.
Further Information