Cornell student's research pictures will be worth 1,000 words -- plus a trip to Greece

By Adrianne Kroepsch

Cornell electrical and computer engineering major Michael Nicolls '03 has embarked on an undergraduate's dream trip to Greece with an $80,000 camera.

Mike Nicolls '03 works on the Roving-CASI camera, in the foreground, on the Greek island of Milos. Photo by Christos Haldoupis

But Nicolls isn't using the expensive equipment to take pictures of the Parthenon like an ordinary tourist. Instead, he's capturing images of the Earth's upper atmosphere as part of a U.S. State Department Fulbright Program research project directed by Michael C. Kelley, the James A. Friend Family Distinguished Professor of Engineering at Cornell.

With additional support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Nicolls traveled solo to Milos, Greece, to set up Kelley's traveling camera and to record images of storms in the lower ionosphere, the region of the atmosphere that is between 95 and 120 kilometers (or 59 to 75 miles) above the Earth -- like a space weatherman. After a month, Nicolls will move the camera to Crete, and Kelley will arrive to supervise collection of data for three more months.

Kelley explains that the ionosphere acts a lot like a heavy fluid with disturbances traveling through it, as described in the short title of his NSF grant, "Winds and Waves in the Upper Atmosphere." This uproar above, however, causes trouble for satellites trying to transmit radio signals through the atmosphere to ground stations, and is a major problem for Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) signals that are used by airplanes and the military. Space scientists like Kelley and his student are trying to learn more about the phenomenon.

"We're going to Greece to study these traveling disturbances, to look at how many there are, how they form, where they're coming from and how they move," said Nicolls, before he left..

The camera, named the Roving-CASI (for Cornell All Sky Imager), has a fish-eye lens with a horizon-to-horizon angle of view. It captures nighttime images of airglow -- light that is given off by various chemical reactions in the upper atmosphere but is much too faint to be seen by the unaided human eye. It then transmits these pictures over the Internet so that Kelley's research team, Cornell doctoral students Jonathan Makela and Pamela Loughmiller, can analyze them remotely.

Greece was selected as a research site because of the opportunity it presents to combine the data collected by the Roving-CASI with radar data collected by Kelley's Greek collaborator, Christos Haldoupis, professor of space sciences at the University of Iraklion, Crete. With camera and radar images of the ionosphere gathered simultaneously, the team will be combining two experiments. By juxtaposing three-dimensional visual images and one-dimensional radar, Kelley hopes to find clear evidence for waves traveling through the layers of the atmosphere and then see how those waves affect the radar.

"Radar data is tough to visualize alone, and pictures are worth 1,000 words. They make it so you can understand what you're looking at with the radar. It's kind of like two blindfolded guys looking at an elephant -- one guy feels the trunk at one end while the other guy is feeling the foot at the other, but if they work together they can figure out what it is they're actually looking at," said Kelley.

Nicolls began working with Kelley last year, after participating in the NSF-funded Research Experience for Undergraduates program at Arecibo Observatory, Puerto Rico, the world's largest radio/radar telescope, managed by Cornell for the NSF.

"I came in just hoping to help out with whatever I could, and I have already done research in Alaska twice now, and here I am, going to Greece," said Nicolls, who also recently presented his research at an American Geophysical Union conference in Washington, D.C.

Kelley praised Nicolls for his willingness to take on the research opportunity. "It's really important for undergraduates to get some sort of summer research experience, especially if they want to go to graduate school," he said. "Successful students like Mike make their own breaks."