Sounding Rocket
Investigations of the Ionosphere

Professors Michael Kelley and Paul Kintner both have active sounding rocket research programs. The rockets are usually assembled and tested at the NASA Wallops Flight Facility and then flown from various facilities around the world. Some of these experiments are outlined below.

NASA recently announced funding for a new equatorial sounding rocket campaign to be conducted from the Punto Lobos launch facility south of Lima, Peru, and the Jicamarca Radio Observatory in the Spring of 2004. Professor David Hysell and Drs. Lynette Gelinas and Wesley Swartz are all PIs on separate grants for this campaign which will investigate winds, waves, and electrodynamics in the E region electrojet region, the F layer of the ionosphere, and the mesosphere.

The purpose of the SIERRA mission was to investigate the primary causes of transverse ion acceleration in the topside auroral ionosphere. The experiment consisted of a main payload and two identical sub-payloads separated by hundreds of meters in a triangular configuration within a plane perpendicular to the geomagnetic field. This configuration permitted the resolving space time ambiguities and provided information on structure at scale lengths of less than 1Km. SIERRA was successfully launched from the Poker Flat Research Range (PFRR) on January 14th, 2002 at 08:23:05 UT.

Professor Michael C. Kelley's LTR Langmuir Turbulence Rocket was launched through the Arecibo HF heater beam to study heating effects in the ionosphere as part of the AMNERIS campaign in Puerto Rico. This natural space plasma laboratory provided data for studying the entire range of linear and nonlinear interactions of electromagnetic waves with a plasma, including both parametric instabilities and collapse of intense fields into cavitons.

Another of Professor Kelley's sounding rockets, Thunderstorm III was launched in September of 1995 to investigate the electromagetic coupling between lightning and the ionosphere. Thunderstorm III flew over an extremely active storm cell. Results presented with co-investigator Dr. Robert Holzworth are available.

Professor Kelley's rocket, nick-named SAL, studies Sporadic Atom Layers and was launched from Puerto Rico in the Fall of 1997.

Professor Paul M. Kintner's rocket, CAPER, was a follow-up experiment for SCIFER. SCIFER was launched at night to investigate the Sounding Cleft of the ion fountain energization region, while CAPER was a daylight launch.

A month prior to the AMICIST launch, Professor Kintner launched a rocket carrying the SCIFER (Sounding of the Cleft Ion Fountain Energization Region) payload from Andoya, Norway. This rocket was mistaken by the Russians for an ICBM! Click here to see the Reuters wire. Andoya, Norway, January, 1995