"With all the satellites flying up there, there is a real desire to understand how this radiation works," Weatherwax said. NASA and the National Science Foundation are collaborating on Firefly, a low-budget program intended to draw students into hands-on research. The science instruments will be incorporated into a football-sized spacecraft known as CubeSat and launched as a secondary payload in 2010 or 2011. Firefly will cost about $1 million for a three-year mission. Lead engineer Joe Kujawski said advances in solar cell technology and electronics made projects like Firefly possible. "These two advances allow us to put functional science instruments in a package 4 inches by 4 inches by 12 inches," he said. Firefly is being designed to simultaneously track lightning strikes and gamma ray flashes to determine what relationship, if any, exists, and what types of lightning trigger the bursts. "We can build this time in history when each photon and electron arrives in this detector and what its energy was," Rowland said. "What we hope to do with Firefly is to know unambiguously that that gamma ray flash was a lightning strike." Related Links: |
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