Bringing Ionospheric Exploration to Pre-College Classrooms: Meeting the Challenges of EPO for the CINDI Mission

Early next year, the Air Force will launch a new atmospheric suite of ionospheric instruments, CINDI (Coupled Ion Neutral Dynamic Investigation), on board a C/NOFS (Communications/Navigations Outage Forecast System) satellite. Finding a way to successfully bring the science of CINDI to non-technical audience, both inside and outside of the classroom, has presented some unique challenges for the CINDI EPO team. CINDI will provide critical information toward better understanding how variability within the ionosphere affects radio communications and navigation. Exciting students, their teachers, and the public about a mission which will return no pictures, and which explores a region of the terrestrial atmosphere that is typically neglected in formal education (and with which the general public is unfamiliar) is difficult, despite the direct impact the ionosphere can have on the functioning of our modern society. We will present the strategies we are employing to make the science of CINDI interesting, relevant, and understandable to a general audience, and to integrate ionospheric exploration into the framework and requirements of existing secondary science curricula and education standards.