Earth’s high-altitude ice clouds are crucial to understanding climate change. Add workforce development into the process and you have another difference-making Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering opportunity.
The Luddy School, with Daniel Loveless, associate professor of Intelligent Systems Engineering, as Indiana University’s lead investigator, will receive a $185,000 grant from NASA to study ice clouds. It’s part of NASA’s Polarized Submillimeter Ice-Cloud Radiometer (POLSIR) project that will launch two small satellites called CubeSats into low-earth orbit to measure the clouds’ daily cycle of ice content. The goal is to improve climate forecasts.
Loveless will form teams of Luddy students who will engage with the scientists designing the instruments as well as with Colorado’s Blue Canyon Technologies engineers building the spacecrafts.
“We usually participate in missions in which we focus on the reliability of the instruments,” Loveless says. “What’s exciting is this is specifically devoted to getting young people involved early.”
That taps into Loveless’ work-force-development priority.
“I’ve worked for a long time to increase work-force opportunities with our research and engineering engagements. This is a wonderful example of how we will do that. It’s not just we’re talking about it in a class. We are engaging at the highest of levels and getting young people involved.”
Luddy students will experience real-world, cutting-edge science. Loveless calls it a ground-floor approach to build a pipeline that allows students to engage in important research. They will learn about building reliable instruments and spacecrafts that can withstand the harsh environment of outer space and get a deeper understanding of the science involved and how researchers will utilize the resulting data.
“We’ll guide students in what it’s like to design, build and deploy a system,” Loveless says. “A lot of planning, a lot of engineering, goes along with that.”
The mission is part of NASA’s Earth Venture Class, a program focused on innovative, cost-effective science missions to better understand Earth’s complex weather systems.
Ice clouds are composed of non-spherical ice particles that start to form around 3.5 miles up (about 18,500 feet) in temperate regions, and four miles up (21,120 feet) in tropical regions.
They are believed to have important roles on climate by reflecting solar radiation (causing a cooling effect) as well as absorbing the earth’s thermal radiation (making it warmer). Better understanding of their impact is crucial to climate research and prediction. Current data comes from spacecrafts in orbits that don’t provide full and regular access to ice clouds.
“We know ice clouds play a role in the global climate model,” Loveless says. “They are really reflective. We don’t have a lot of data for them, so that part of the model has a lot of uncertainty. POLSIR was intended to fill that gap and strengthen our understanding.”
The grant, which runs until 2030, came after years of proposal development and team building with experts from Vanderbilt University, the University of Wisconsin, Blue Canyon Technologies, NASA and its Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, Paris Saclay University, Columbia University, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, GMCO, University of Maryland Baltimore County, Indiana University, the University of Michigan and Texas A&M University.
The mission is led by Ralf Bennartz, principal investigator at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., and by Dong Wu, deputy principal investigator at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
NASA Goddard will provide the project management team that builds the two instruments. The University of Wisconsin’s Space Science and Engineering Center will conduct science operations. Blue Canyon Technologies out of Lafayette, Colorado, will build the two spacecraft. Launch of the two satellites is anticipated for late 2027.
“It’s a big initiative,” Loveless says.
At 20 centimeters wide, 60 centimeters tall and 10 centimeters deep, each CubeSat can easily fit atop a standard-sized desk. They are packed with advanced instruments “that can do high-quality science in small volumes,” Loveless says.
As far as workforce development, Loveless says the focus is on recruiting and training students to thrive in microelectronic technology. It’s about building curriculum at the high school and college levels that target spacecraft design and building instruments capable of collecting data in outer space.
“What do we do with the data we receive from an instrument like this?” Loveless says. “How will it inform our understanding of climate?”
Loveless and Indiana high school teachers will spend the summer developing that curriculum. Similar efforts are occurring through Vanderbilt University, led by Professor Chris Vangas.
High school students who start this program in the near future could be at the Luddy School when CubeSats are launched.
“It will resemble the experience you’d get if you get a job at NASA involved in these kinds of missions,” Loveless says. “We’re trying to embody that. We want to get students involved at an early age.
“The science is interesting. The engineering is interesting. Technically, we’re happy with that. But it’s the workforce development piece that is super exciting for me.”