Within the next few days, two rockets will be sent into space from an Alaska launch site. Dartmouth physics researchers have participated in the mission as part of “Cube Swarm,” an operation that aims to launch low-cost satellites into short-term orbits around the Earth. One of the rockets, carrying College instruments, will not orbit the Earth but will instead test a new hardware system that may be used in future orbiting satellites, physics professor Kristina Lynch said.
A “cube” is a small and cheaply constructed satellite, consisting of a box containing data-gathering instruments and a device to communicate this data to researchers on the ground.
Although the researchers’ initial plan was to launch a pair of rockets yesterday, both were postponed. NASA delayed the first rocket’s launch because the moon was too bright Wednesday afternoon, while the second was hindered by snow, Lynch said. The team will try again when conditions improve in the coming days.
Once launched, the first, larger rocket will gather data about the aurora borealis, also known as the northern lights. The northern lights are a phenomena caused by the collisions of charged particles just outside the earth’s atmosphere.
Marilia Samara GR’05 is the principal investigator for the larger rocket and is currently at the launch site in Venetie, Alaska. The rocket will measure particles like ions and electrons as well as electric and magnetic fields, Samara said. The instruments on board the rocket are complemented by ground-based imaging equipment, allowing the aurora to be viewed from both above and below.
With the launch Samara, who currently works at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas, is continuing research she did as a Dartmouth graduate student.
The smaller rocket will only reach an altitude of 5 kilometers before returning to Earth, said Rob Clayton, a second-year Dartmouth graduate student working on the project.
It carries a communications device, a GPS and other instruments from Dartmouth. Although not a Cube Swarm rocket, it will test technology for potential future use, Lynch said.
The Cube Swarm project will tell scientists how the aurora moves through space in a way that individual rockets cannot. Typically, data is only taken from a single rocket, so researchers are often unable to distinguish between the movement of the rocket and that of the aurora, Lynch said. Because Cube Swarm has more than one point of data collection, it provides more conclusive results.
Cube Swarm rockets will cost less than the “solid-gold Cadillac” rockets researchers are currently launching, Lynch said. Because the “cubes” will only be in space for up to three months at a time, they do not need the expensive features like radiation resistance that satellite parts currently have, Lynch said.
“We’re trying to figure out how cheap you can make your spacecraft and still get viable science out of it,” Lynch said.
A group of Dartmouth undergraduates started Cube Swarm in 2008 after deciding they wanted to take more direction over their work instead of having to do “a lot of soldering, screwing and bolting,” Lynch said.
“Green Cube,” the predecessor of Cube Swarm hardware, flew over nearby Mount Washington in a high altitude balloon. A later version of this project saw a swarm of “cubes” in Tupperware containers floating down the Connecticut River, Lynch said.
The project will launch third rocket in April, which will be larger than the first two, Clayton said. This rocket will fly higher than the one designed to research the aurora, ascending up to 135 kilometers.
In March, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory will work with the Green Cube project in a collaborative study on the design of low-cost satellites, Clayton said.
Eventually, the “swarm” will be put into orbit by a rocket about 400 kilometers above earth, Clayton said. The satellites will be released and propelled away from the rocket mid-flight.
Students interested in viewing the aurora from Hanover can do so with little hassle, said Lynch. At the College’s latitude, the aurora can occasionally be seen on a dark night with a clear view to the north.
“If you were faithfully watching every night from midnight to 3 a.m., you’d probably see it a couple times this winter,” Lynch said.
A co-investigator on the project, Robert Michell GR’07, also did graduate work at the College. The project was coordinated and run by physics professor Mark Conde of the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks.
