January 19, 2011 AARC Noon Meeting:
Brian Day on Amateur Radio Participation in LADEE Lunar Science

Brian Day, Education/Public Outreach (E/PO) Lead for the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) presented this program and that offers students and the public exciting ways to participate in science supporting the mission through observations of meteoroid impacts on the Moon and meteors in the Earth’s atmosphere. Brian specifically asked amateur radio people to become involved by using their skills in meteor scatter to collect meteor shower data which will be used in correlation of measurements by LADEE instruments.

Mr. Day has worked as a software engineer in the Silicon Valley since 1982, taught programming courses at San Jose State, and served as chairman of the observatory at Foothill College for 16 years.

AARC re-transmitted audio of this meeting on 145.585 MHz. We may perform same service on future AARC meetings.

PDF of Brian Day’s presentation can be seen here.

Amateur Radio Participation in LADEE Lunar Science

The local amateur radio community has an opportunity to directly participate in, and support, a NASA Ames Research Center developed mission and contribute to lunar science research.

The Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) spacecraft, an innovative example of NASA’s new small, low cost, spacecraft technologies and missions, is scheduled to launch in May 2013, go into lunar orbit, then drop down to low altitude to directly sample and measure the lunar atmosphere as a critical part of the international science focus to increase scientific understanding of the lunar environment and processes.

Results from the LADEE mission will augment scientific knowledge and understanding regarding the critical atmospheric component of the lunar environment, supplementing lunar surface science results from the recent, highly successful, Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) mission, another mission controlled and operated by Ames Research Center locally, that, working in conjunction with the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), recently confirmed the presence of water and a water cycle on the moon.

Since the Earth and the Moon travel together through space, encountering streams of debris together, observations of meteors in the Earth’s atmosphere can allow us to make inferences as to what is happening on the lunar surface; information valuable to the LADEE science mission.

While meteor counts from visual and video observations will provide useful data and a way for the general public to participate in the science of the mission, counts made by radio observers listening for reflection events provide some unique advantages for the mission, as well as, some unique opportunities to experience and participate in a different, unique, mode of radio communications for research; forward scatter meteor detection.

Additional, specific, information and guidance on this LADEE mission science support opportunity will be made available through this web site as the program develops.

More information on the LADEE mission can be found at http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LADEE/main/.

Information on Forward Scatter Meteor Detection, and NASA’s Forward Scatter Meteor RADAR system and program, including typical equipment requirements and configurations, can be found at http://www.nasa.gov/offices/meo/outreach/forward_scatter_detail.html.

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