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Iridium recently announced that its satellite constellation is not only serving as an important research platform, but is also demonstrated Iridium NEXT’s future hosted payload capabilities.
Scientists at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) soon will be supplying the international scientific community with first-ever global, near real-time images of Earth’s space weather through a program known as AMPERE – the Active Magnetosphere and Planetary Electrodynamics Response Experiment. AMPERE is dramatically improving scientists’ ability to monitor and forecast changes in the space weather system. In particular, AMPERE will enable researchers to study the underlying causes of powerful geomagnetic storms that generate electric currents that flow in and out of Earth’s atmosphere. The currents trigger the stunning aurora borealis lights at high latitudes, but they also can disrupt telecommunications systems, utility power grids and GPS navigation systems, as well as pose dangers to high-altitude aircraft and astronauts. The knowledge gained through AMPERE can help researchers devise ways to better safeguard technologies adversely impacted by this storm activity.
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Several years in the making, AMPERE, led by APL Principal Investigator Dr. Brian J. Anderson, is a collaboration involving APL, Iridium and The Boeing Company. Recognizing the potential benefits to be derived from AMPERE, the National Science Foundation (NSF) granted $4 million in July 2008 to fund it. The NSF is a federal government agency with a mission to advance scientific knowledge, including space research, and to enhance engineering, science and technology education in the United States.
Now, the AMPERE project is starting to pay off. APL researchers, working from their offices in Laurel, Md., recently began making daily images and movies of electromagnetic currents from the sun’s energy using data collected and transmitted via Iridium’s satellite communications network.
Getting AMPERE off the ground involved a little technological ingenuity on the part of APL, Iridium and Boeing. Iridium’s satellites are outfitted with magnetometers, sensors that collect measurements of the magnetic field and enable ground operators to monitor the space vehicles’ “attitude control.” The magnetometers help ensure that the satellites are traveling in proper orbit and that their antennas are positioned correctly to transmit and receive signals. However, to be of use to scientists studying space weather, the sensors had to collect more data and transmit it to the ground at a much faster rate than required for constellation monitoring.
Boeing operations team’s solution was to modify software on each of the 66 satellites. Boeing, which manages the daily operation of the Iridium network, handled the software upgrade and upload, which resulted in a 100-fold increase in the number of data measurements collected and transmitted from the magnetometers. During early testing, APL researchers gathered nearly 300,000 samples of space’s magnetic field per day. Over 40-hour-long test periods, the researchers ramped that up by 10-fold, collecting nearly 3 million data samples daily.
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By early summer 2010, Boeing had uploaded the software changes to every Iridium satellite. Since then, APL has established a daily routine for collecting and processing the data into images of the Earth’s aurora region, a process that consists of handling thousands of lines of computer code. For the first time ever, AMPERE will provide the research community a continuous, global view of Earth’s response to supersonic blasts of plasma ejected from the sun. APL is now working to enable the laboratory to quickly process incoming data from the satellites so that scientists anywhere in the world can watch space weather as it develops in near real-time.
According to Dr. Lars Dyrud, a scientist at APL who is involved in converting the AMPERE data into information that is scientifically useful, throughout the project, Iridium’s satellite network has never failed to deliver. The data travels from the satellites to Iridium’s Satellite Network Operations Center (SNOC) in Northern Virginia and is routed to APL’s Internet servers on a continuous basis.
“Once we got all the bugs fixed on the new software, getting the data down from the satellites has never been an issue,” Dyrud said. “The satellite network is global, reliable and consistent, which is one of the real differences for AMPERE. When scientists deploy instruments, whether on the ground or in space, one of the major hurdles to get over is getting the data to your office where you can do something with it. Using Iridium, that hassle has been completely eliminated.”
One of the most exciting aspects of AMPERE is that data will be flowing as geomagnetic storm activity caused by the sun is entering a cycle of renewed activity, noted Dyrud. The sun goes through an 11-year activity cycle, reaching a peak, dropping off and then slowing ramping back up. The last solar maximum occurred in 2004, and the next peak is expected to occur during the next two years.
“We have no prediction of how severe the next solar maximum is going to be, but we have to be ready for what could be extreme consequences,” Dyrud said. “With AMPERE in place, we’ll be right here, monitoring and informing people about it.”
The AMPERE project’s success represents a breakthrough for science and showcases how industry, academia and government can partner to advance society’s understanding of space and how humans can benefit, according to Dyrud.
“We could never have gone to NASA or the NSF and requested the kind of money that would have been necessary to deploy satellites on our own to generate these kinds of measurements,” Dyrud said. “AMPERE is one of the first examples of a public-private partnership to leverage commercial satellite assets for scientific research, and I think this sort of collaboration represents the future.”
The ability of scientists to tap into Iridium’s satellite constellation demonstrates the flexibility of the network’s architecture, said Dr. Om P. Gupta, director of strategic market development for Iridium NEXT.
“The results we are seeing from AMPERE clearly demonstrate the capability of our satellites and ground infrastructure to support secondary missions, including important scientific research,” Dr. Gupta said. “The real value proposition of Iridium’s meshed, low-latency, cross-linked satellite network is that we are not only providing researchers a global view of space, but we are sending the data to the ground almost instantly. For the first time, scientists have a very sophisticated method of detecting space weather in almost real time, which is tremendously valuable.”
The experience with AMPERE previews the unprecedented opportunities Iridium is offering for scientific research on its next-generation constellation of satellites, Iridium NEXT. Iridium is designing the enhanced system, planned for launch beginning first quarter 2015, to host a wide range of secondary payloads for remotely monitoring phenomena such as polar ice cap changes, atmospheric humidity and temperature, and ozone profiles.
“This is truly a once-in-a-generation opportunity, and we are excited to make this capability available to the scientific community,” Gupta said. “Because we need to begin planning now for hosted payloads with special needs, we encourage researchers and government agencies to contact us now about the possibilities of leveraging Iridium NEXT.” |
