Recent  

This paper outlines the development of a color filter wheel, attached to a broadband CL detector, which allows us to recover spectroscopic information and generate composite color images. The embedded data from the pixels were used to generate 2D and 3D graphs providing multiple visual pathways for comparing relative intensities. The design can be adjusted to accommodate various chamber specifications and expand the capabilities of the broadband CL detectors housed at many institutions.

In most cases, the Soil Water Content measurement is carried out using commercially available dielectric permittivity-based probes such as Time Domain Reflectometers or Frequency Domains Reflectometers. However, these probes use transfer functions which may be inadequate in the concerned soil. Raw SWC measurement in clayey soil shows an important relative error. A simple protocol is presented which allows for recovery of an acceptable accuracy of the FDR SWC measurements.

Potential users of all sky camera images include even power company, tourists and aurora enthusiast. However, these potential users are normally not familiar to interpreting these images. To make them comprehensive for wide users, we developed an automatic evaluation system of the 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 aurora explosion).

The design, characteristics, and performance of a CubeSat magnetometer board (Quad-Mag) equipped with four PNI RM3100 magnetometers is presented. The inclusion of four sensors allows a potential factor of two reduction in the noise floor established for an individual sensor via oversampling with multiple sensors. The Quad-Mag is shown to enable 1 nT magnetic field measurements at 1 Hz and 5.345 nT at 65 Hz using commercial-off-the-shelf sensors for space applications.

Electromagnetic sensors in a drone setup allow a lot of movability and downscale the cost and risk typically associated with an airborne system. This paper discusses the pros and cons of our newly developed drone-towed sensor system, where we use the controlled source electromagnetic sensor GEM2-UAV. We conduct 6 different tests dealing with altitude dependency, temperature drift, transmission frequencies, T- and P-mode, and drone noise. Additional, we show a data set collected with the system.

The Sweeping Langmuir Probe on board the PICASSO CubeSat was designed to measure the plasma parameters. Before launch, the instrument has been tested in a plasma chamber. It is shown that the traditional method to interpret the data cannot be applied directly for this type of probes, 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 effect of the contamination of the probe surface are investigated.

The ability to make reliable magnetic measurements in space is very important for a broad range of applications in space science. Here, we present the design and performance of a new magnetometer that looks very promising for making stable reliable magnetic measurements in space. We show that the Tesseract performs better than the traditional ring-core design in metrics that are associated with stability.

MDAL is a near real-time, satellite-based surface albedo product based on the geostationary Meteosat Second Generation mission. We propose an update to the processing algorithm that generates MDAL and evaluate the results of these changes through comparison against the pre-update, currently operational MDAL product, as well as another satellite based albedo product, ETAL, and data based on in-situ measurements. We find that the update provides a valuable improvement.