MicroMAPS: Leveraging Federal and Universities' Resources for Atmospheric Sciences Research and Education
Abstract
NASA Langley Research Center approached the Virginia Space Grant Consortium, a NASA-sponsored coalition of universities, NASA research centers and state agencies with the opportunity to develop a scientific mission and flight opportunities for an un-flown atmospheric composition remote sensor, MicroMAPS. The resulting partnership led to new life for this instrument from a space-borne carbon monoxide remote sensor to an high altitude airborne instrument that measures tropospheric carbon monoxide in the near infrared portion of the spectrum. The five year effort to date has leveraged the existing instrument with work by student teams overseen by faculty and NASA advisors, with both NASA and industry contributions. The result is a viable instrument system that has flown in four international scientific field campaigns aboard the Scaled Composites Proteus aircraft, generating 300 plus hours of CO data to date over North America, Italy, the Mediterranean, England, the North Sea, Darwin, Northern Australia, the Atlantic Ocean, the Indian Ocean, and the Pacific Ocean between Australia and California. A relatively small investment by NASA and contributions by 56 students and nine faculty members, both active and retired NASA engineers and scientists, as well as a Canadian aerospace research company (which designed and built the MicroMAPS instrument) yielded successful results that go well beyond the instrument and data retrieved. The effort provided a valuable educational research experience for students from three universities whose work included contributions in: 1) Development of the instrument system and pod design for the Proteus flights; 2) Development of assessment strategy and analysis of instrument performance; 3) Development of the operations and data management strategy; 4) Contributions to development of design, implementation, and analysis of sensor calibration at Resonance Ltd., Barrie, Canada 5) Development of a new data reduction strategy for the airborne configuration over northern mid-latitudes and tropical regions. 6) Development of the instrument system and pod design for possible flights on Altair (a unmanned airborne vehicle managed at the NASA Dryden Flight Center) and 7) Geo-referencing of MicroMAPS data. An overview of the MicroMAPS project partnership will be presented and the potential for collaboration between federal laboratories and industry with National Space Grant Consortia and their Space Grant universities on similar partnerships will be described.
- Publication:
-
AGU Spring Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- May 2007
- Bibcode:
- 2007AGUSMED31B..04S
- Keywords:
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- 0300 ATMOSPHERIC COMPOSITION AND STRUCTURE;
- 0478 Pollution: urban;
- regional and global (0345;
- 4251);
- 0480 Remote sensing;
- 0800 EDUCATION