An international project launched by Stanford electrical engineers promises to poke another hole in the notion that there's nothing new under the sun. One place where much remains to be explored is the ionosphere—the outermost portion of the Earth's atmosphere—and a team from the Space, Telecommunications, and Radioscience (STAR) Lab is making it possible for scientists from developing countries to join the effort.
The project comes under the auspices of the U.N.-designated International Heliophysical Year, with support from NASA and the European Space Agency. The goal of IHY (stretching from 2007 to 2009) is to develop a better understanding of the Earth's physics and how the planet fits into the grander solar environment. The Stanford group's contribution is to build a worldwide research community based on affordable technology it has developed for monitoring very low frequency radio waves, with practical applications in meteorology and long-range communications. They call it AWESOME, shorthand for atmospheric weather electromagnetic system for observation, modeling and education.
Doctoral student Morris Cohen peers into the line receiver box and points to a small, light green card. “That's the $100 off-the-shelf module we got on the Internet that replaced a $3,000 satellite clock,” he says, beaming the smile of a fix-it guru.
Making the economical switch in parts enabled Cohen and his colleagues to think way outside their aluminum boxes. From deep inside the basement of the Packard building, they already were probing the Earth's upper atmosphere. But they began to look at remote corners of the globe, too.
Sheila Bijoor, a graduate student in electrical engineering, chimes in. “Phase one was building the technology—getting it to be durable and portable and inexpensive,” she says. “Now, the IHY part is building the AWESOME community.”
The team now can package a university-grade research instrument that costs about $4,000 and distribute it at little to no cost to researchers in developing countries, thanks to Stanford cost-sharing and NASA and IHY funding.
“The most exciting part is the fact that we have found a niche in which we can contribute,” says Umran Inan, professor of electrical engineering and director of the STAR lab and its VLF group. “We have found a situation where Stanford students and Stanford instruments can contribute. We can help people write their first scientific papers and experience the exhilaration of doing science.”
Picture an assistant professor of physics or of electrical engineering at a university in Uzbekistan receiving in the mail a box the size of a typical microwave oven. He opens it and reads through the instruction manual. He then unrolls the cable that will serve as a simple antenna, connects the preamplifier and line receiver to a computer and sets out to monitor VLF radio waves. By studying the incoming data and analyzing variations in the ionosphere, he can add to the understanding of that little-explored region.
“Someone who has never written a scientific paper may look at the data and ask a question that hasn't occurred to us,” Inan, PhD '77, suggests. Unlike many other fields of science, where “all of the ripe apples are already picked, and you have to squeeze and squeeze to get the next paper out,” Inan says that “little is known” about VLF. “Not too much has been unraveled, and therefore major discoveries are waiting to be made.”
VLF radio waves are a tool for studying the physics of the ionosphere. At 100 kilometers above the earth, the region is too high for exploration by balloons or aircraft, yet too low for satellites to navigate. Instead, VLF researchers study electromagnetic waves generated naturally—by lightning strikes, solar flares and earthquakes—or by man-made transmitters as a diagnostic tool.
The prospect of combining hands-on work with theoretical studies was a strong magnetic pull for Cohen and Bijoor. After spending his first two years in the lab helping design the receiver boxes, as Seinfeld replays blared beside him, Cohen, '03, MS '04, says he's “probably one of the very few students” who has had the opportunity to build hardware and do theoretical work on the same project. He hopes to put that experience to use teaching at the university level. Bijoor, '05, MS '08, majored in electrical engineering and minored in international relations and she plans to use a Ford Fellowship from the Haas Center for Public Service to work at a philanthropic foundation next year. “I really want to look at ways you can adopt technology to help developing countries.”
The practical applications of VLF studies are far-ranging. The navies of many countries have used VLF waves for decades for long-range communication, and the United States has a lightning detection network that depends on VLF technology. “If you look at a map of aviation over the United States, at any point in time there are thousands of planes in the air,” Inan says. “And if there's a thunderstorm in Arkansas, you will see all the planes route themselves around it.” He pauses. “But there's no global equivalent of that.”
The prospect of establishing such a network excites VLF researchers, who are now collaborating with scientists studying optical phenomena produced by radiation—such as the electrical discharges known as “sprites” and “elves”—with cameras mounted in the Pyrenees and on Corsica. “Someone in Europe will say, 'I saw a sprite at this moment,' and then a guy in Libya will say, 'My VLF signal at that instant showed this variation,'” Inan says. “VLF people suddenly have collaborators—they're not working in isolation.”
In May, Inan went to Libya to sign memos of agreement with three university presidents to collaborate with researchers there. And in June, Libya hosted the first-ever AWESOME workshop, with participants from Denmark, India, Ethiopia, Egypt, Serbia, Uzbekistan, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, South Agrica, U.A.E., Greece and Turkey. Inan and his students took laptops, projectors and CDs full of data, and the attending researchers learned how to use the tools in one-on-one tutorials.
“We want to find young, motivated people who want to do careers in science,” Inan says. “And we want them to come out of the workshop able to write refereed scientific papers.”
