ISR Activities in April 2024

April 2024 saw members of BC/ISR traveling across the country to catch the total solar eclipse, including Vermont, New York, and Ohio. Closer to home, we provided eclipse glasses & answered questions from BC students and staff in the BC Law parking lot and on main campus where it reached ~93%. ISR’s Newton-based ionospheric monitoring equipment detected signal changes in the data due to the eclipse that are currently being analyzed by D. Paznukhov. Also in April, ISR postdoc Teddy Surco Espejo (top left) went to Manila, Philippines for the UN/Philippines Workshop on the Applications of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), where he gave a talk on his research on using ROTI to estimate ionospheric scintillation, co-authored by IRS’s Charles Carrano & Keith Groves. Scintillation can cause errors in GPS signals, for example, and compromise the accuracy of positions and timing. Associate Director Keith Groves attended the 2024 Space Weather Workshop in Boulder, Colorado, presenting an overview of SPARTA, BC/ISR’s new NASA Space Weather Center of Excellence, which is also focusing on improving scintillation predictions.

Image credits: top-left & center: T. Surco Espejo; lower-right: SWW 2024; ionospheric data: D. Paznukhov