This faculty research team presents a chance to join an exciting research group that has won competitive NASA selections to design, build, and test particle instruments for a variety of space-based missions. Sending these detectors out into interplanetary space to measure plasma velocity, density, and temperature of the solar wind increases our understanding of the Sun’s corona and the solar wind. One such mission, the Parker Solar Probe is now in its third orbit around the Sun, getting closer and moving faster than any man-made object has before. As part of a suite of instruments, the Solar Probe Cup (SPC) built by Professor Kasper’s team of scientists and engineers has a front row seat on the spacecraft.
A new mission is emerging: NASA’s Sun Radio Interferometer Space Experiment (SunRISE) project, which will characterize coronal mass ejections, the most violent type of space weather. The mission is set to launch in 2024. This MDP team will build a parallel data processing pipeline for the SunRISE mission that will identify planetary emission from outer planets like Jupiter in response to extreme space weather. Additionally, the team will build and operate a ground-based radio antenna array whose frequency coverage partially overlaps with that of SunRISE. This antenna array will enable a myriad of student research, including numerical simulation of the antenna gain pattern, tracking low frequency bursts from lightning, and imaging the brightest galactic sources. SunRISE is expected to launch in late-2024 and operate for at least 12 months in orbit. The MDP team has already deployed a radio antenna at nearby Peach Mountain and have made progress in creating additional software analysis pipelines for future SunRISE data. In this next term of MDP, the team is aiming to deploy a full 4 element radio interferometer at Peach Mountain and build a software analysis pipeline for imaging the data. The MDP team will also fabricate a 2 element radio interferometer to deploy at a high school in the Michigan Upper Peninsula.
The Space Physics Research Lab has an extensive history of successful instrument builds that have flown or are currently in orbit about some planetary body in the solar system such as Cassini, the mission to Saturn, SAM, an instrument onboard the Mars Rover Curiosity and much more.
Team Organization
Each subteam has a team leader that reports to and meets with the faculty PI. The teams are flexibly structured to enhance creativity and opportunity for student growth.
First-year undergraduates through master’s graduate students are welcome to apply, and all will be encouraged to stay on the team for more than the two-semester minimum. Leadership roles are available in the lab, and experienced students will be a natural fit for these positions as their knowledge grows over time.
Below are the skills needed for this project. Students with the following relevant skills and interest in the project are encouraged to apply! Although the team consists of subteams, students apply to the project as a whole, rather than individual roles on the team.
Mechanical Subteam (3 Students)
Preferred Skills: Completed/taking ME 250 or AERO 205; Solidworks/CAD modeling; Machining(Mill); Mechanical Design; FEA; Matlab/Simulink; CNC; General Machining
Likely Majors: ME, AERO, MSE, SPACE
Specific Tasks: Design and build permanent fixtures for radio antenna. Design and deploy hardware setup for self-sufficient radio array. Provide support for hardware in ground array.
Electrical Subteam (3 Students)
Preferred Skills: Completed EECS 215/EECS 314; Completed/taking EECS 230; Completed/taking EECS 411; Circuit design; Radio Design; Soldering; LabVIEW
Likely Majors: EE, CE, ECE
Specific Tasks: Alter bandpass filter in LWA antenna to observe frequencies below 20 MHz. Track down electromagnetic noise sources from within the antenna & receiver systems. Provide support for hardware in ground array.
Software and Data Analysis Subteam (3 Students)
Preferred Skills: Programming experience: Python/MATLAB/IDL (emphasis on Python); taken/taking EECS 280; data analysis; signal analysis/processing (taken/taking EECS 216); website design experience (HTML/CSS/Javascript)
Likely Majors: CS, DATA, EE, PHYSICS, SI, SPACE, CLIMATE
Specific Tasks: Design transient array detection, beamforming, and classification database for SunRISE. Provide support for computer hardware in the ground array. Design software to process ground array’s data with FX correlation.
Apprentice Researcher (3 Students)
Preferred Skills: Interest in project material, willingness to develop skills. Students will be integrated into the operations of a subteam. Open to First-year and Second-year undergrad students ONLY.
Likely Majors: Any
Faculty Sponsors
Mojtaba Akhavan-Tafti, PhD
Assistant Research Scientist, Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering
Dr. Mojtaba Akhavan-Tafti is the Principal Investigator of the Heliophysics Team. He is also the Principal Investigator of the Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission Early-Career Grant, titled: “Magnetic Reconnection between Coalescing Magnetic Flux Bundles,” utilizing state-of-the-art in-situ observations and global kinetic simulations. He also has experience analyzing spacecraft data from Parker Solar Probe to look for magnetic switchbacks in its data. He is also the head of SunRISE outreach, and the primary instructor for the MDP course. His interests also span into entrepreneurship, having started a company to bring a cutting-edge solar panel device to market.
Justin Kasper, PhD
Professor, Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering
Dr. Kasper is the Executive Mentor of the Heliophysics team. He designs sensors for spacecraft that explore extreme environments in space from the surface of the Sun to the outer edges of the solar system. Recipient of the 2020 Copernicus Medal, Dr. Kasper is interested in understanding the forces that lead to solar flares and the solar wind, a stream of particles heated to millions of degrees in the Sun’s atmosphere, or corona. His major results concern heating, instabilities, and helium in the solar corona and solar wind, and the impact of space weather on society. In 2007, he used measurements by the Voyager spacecraft to detect the termination shock, a massive shockwave surrounding our solar system. He has served on advisory committees for NASA, the National Science Foundation, and the National Academy of Sciences. He currently leads the SWEAP Investigation, an international team of scientists and engineers building sensors that will collect samples of the Sun for the NASA Solar Probe Plus spacecraft, a mission of exploration that made history as the first human-made object to plunge into the solar corona. He is also the Principal Investigator for SunRISE, a NASA Heliophysics Mission of Opportunity that will launch 6 satellites into GEO orbit to create the first synthetic aperture in space, imaging radio frequencies from 0.1 – 25 MHz.
Weekly Meeting Time and Location: For academic credit, our MDP full team meets in-person for a general team meeting on Wednesdays 4:30 pm – 5:30 pm ET. Each subteam also meets once a week in-person. A two-term commitment will begin January 2025.
In-person participation is expected.
Course Substitutions: Honors, CS-ENGR/DS-ENGR/EE/CE-ENGR 355 and higher can count toward Flex Tech
These substitutions/departmental courses are available for students in these respective majors. MDP does not yet have a formal agreement with other departments for substitutions/departmental courses not listed. Please reach out to your home department’s academic advisor about how you might apply MDP credits to your degree plan.
Citizenship Requirements: This project is open to all students on campus.
IP/NDA: Students who successfully match to this project team will be required to sign an Intellectual Property (IP) Agreement prior to participation in January 2025.
Summer Opportunity: Summer research fellowships may be available for qualifying students.
Learn more about the expectations for this type of MDP project