Firestation in Space to Open Firehose of Lightning Data

Data Analysis Firestation in Space to Open Firehose of Lightning DataFirestation’s principal investigator Doug Rowland of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center poses with the engineering unit of Firestation’s interface board. Courtesy of NASA/Debora McCallumWhen opportunity knocked, NASA heliophysicist Doug Rowland answered. He and his team recently secured another flight opportunity for a pint-sized instrument studying lightning in Earth’s upper atmosphere and now are bracing for a veritable “fire hose” of data about a little-understood phenomenon first discovered by scientists nearly two decades ago. The instrument, Firestation, is one of four experiments manifested to fly on an experiment pallet the U.S. Department of Defense plans to deploy on the International Space Station in 2013. It’s a near duplicate of Firefly, which Rowland and his team at the NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD, began developing more than three years ago to fly on an emerging class of tiny satellites called Cubesats sponsored by the National Science Foundation. That mission also may launch in 2013.Having secured a berth on the pallet, Rowland and his university partners must complete Firestation by the spring of 2012 for integration onto the pallet.That shouldn’t be an issue, Rowland said. Firestation is a knock-off of… Read full this story

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