2008 Woodie Awards
UCF project chosen as part of NASA program
Jonathan Hohensee
Issue date: 7/24/08 Section: News
A space project from UCF was selected by NASA to be a part of the agency's Explorer Program Mission of Opportunity investigations.
The Global-Scale Observations of the Limb and Disk, also known as GOLD, was one of two projects that were selected by NASA from a group of 17 proposals. The purpose of the project is to provide first observations of global-scale temperatures in the thermosphere, observe the density profiles of oxygen, and provide real-time observations for Space Weather First global-scale observations.
The project will involve an ultraviolet imaging spectrograph being flown into space attached to a geostationary satellite. This information will be used to find out information about the Earth's thermosphere and ionosphere. The GOLD project will be launched on the Explorer satellite in 2012, and the commercial satellite that the instrument package will be flying on has not yet been chosen.
UCF physicist Richard Eastes is the project's principal investigator, a job that Eastes describes as being the person who NASA holds responsible for everything that goes right and goes wrong.
"We are basically looking at the Earth's upper atmosphere," Eastes said. "In layman's terms, if there is weather in Earth, there is also weather in space. They are not closely coupled in any way, as far as we understand it at the moment, there might be some coupling, but we need clear evidence of any close coupling.
"What we are trying to do is better understand … what space weather is and how it responds to the sun's influence."
In addition to Eastes, the GOLD project involves members of numerous different professors and grad students from UCF. From the university's Center for Research and Education in Optics and Lasers is professor James Harvey, and from the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science are professors Hassan Foroosh, Jun Wang and Huiyang Zhou, who work to develop. Also on the project is Andrey Krywonos, a post-doctoral researcher who recently was awarded a Ph.D. from CREOL. Eastes' research is being conducted at UCF's Florida Space Institute at Kennedy Space Center.
The Global-Scale Observations of the Limb and Disk, also known as GOLD, was one of two projects that were selected by NASA from a group of 17 proposals. The purpose of the project is to provide first observations of global-scale temperatures in the thermosphere, observe the density profiles of oxygen, and provide real-time observations for Space Weather First global-scale observations.
The project will involve an ultraviolet imaging spectrograph being flown into space attached to a geostationary satellite. This information will be used to find out information about the Earth's thermosphere and ionosphere. The GOLD project will be launched on the Explorer satellite in 2012, and the commercial satellite that the instrument package will be flying on has not yet been chosen.
UCF physicist Richard Eastes is the project's principal investigator, a job that Eastes describes as being the person who NASA holds responsible for everything that goes right and goes wrong.
"We are basically looking at the Earth's upper atmosphere," Eastes said. "In layman's terms, if there is weather in Earth, there is also weather in space. They are not closely coupled in any way, as far as we understand it at the moment, there might be some coupling, but we need clear evidence of any close coupling.
"What we are trying to do is better understand … what space weather is and how it responds to the sun's influence."
In addition to Eastes, the GOLD project involves members of numerous different professors and grad students from UCF. From the university's Center for Research and Education in Optics and Lasers is professor James Harvey, and from the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science are professors Hassan Foroosh, Jun Wang and Huiyang Zhou, who work to develop. Also on the project is Andrey Krywonos, a post-doctoral researcher who recently was awarded a Ph.D. from CREOL. Eastes' research is being conducted at UCF's Florida Space Institute at Kennedy Space Center.