The Sweeping Langmuir Probe on board the PICASSO CubeSat was designed to measure plasma parameters. Before launch, the instrument was tested in a plasma chamber. It is shown that the traditional method to interpret the data cannot be applied directly for this type of probe, and an adaptation is proposed. It is reported how, with a reduced number of data points, the plasma parameters can still be retrieved. Finally, the effects of the contamination of the probe surface are discussed.

This project aims to demonstrate the viability of the development of a concept prototype that has, as a differential, free software and hardware used in its development and operation. It thus has unique characteristics compared with commercially available equipment for signal detection, providing strong rejection of spurious electrical noise, typical of urban areas. This project is important academic contribution to open-source instrumental research.

Important topics in land–atmosphere feedback research are water and energy balances and heterogeneities of fluxes at the land surface and in the atmosphere. To target these questions, the Land–Atmosphere Feedback Observatory (LAFO) has been installed in Germany. The instrumentation allows for comprehensive measurements from the bedrock to the troposphere. The LAFO observation strategy aims for simultaneous measurements in all three compartments: atmosphere, soil and land surface, and vegetation.

In most cases, the soil water content (SWC) measurement is carried out using commercially available dielectric-permittivity-based probes such as time domain reflectometers or frequency domain reflectometers (FDR). However, these probes use transfer functions which may be inadequate in the soil concerned. Raw SWC measurement in clayey soil shows an important relative error. A simple protocol is presented, allowing for the recovery of an acceptable accuracy of the FDR SWC measurements.

The expendable current profiler (XCP) is a single-use instrument that rapidly measures currents, including the velocity, flow direction, and temperature of seawater. This study improves upon the design of the XCP to reduce the cost of the single-use devices. This has been achieved by adopting signal modulation and demodulation to transmit analog signals on an enamelled wire and digitizing the signal above the surface of the water.

Potential users of all-sky aurora images even include power companies, tourists, and aurora enthusiasts. However, these potential users are normally not familiar with interpreting these images. To make them comprehensive for more users, we developed an automatic evaluation system of auroral activity level. The method involves two steps: first making a simple set of numbers that describes the auroral activity and then further simplifying them into several levels (Level 6 is an auroral explosion).

The paper describes the ground-based camera equipment to obtain images from dust ablation phenomena (meteors) in the Earth's atmosphere. The meteors are observed from two locations, but one station is equipped with a camera containing a spectral grating, which allows following and determining the spectral information through the meteor ablation process. We describe the data merging, calibration, and processing to finally derive the meteor composition.