Atmospheric Wave Research Mission releases data from the first 3,000 orbits

Following the 3,000th orbit of NASA’s adoration (Atmosphere Wave Experiment) on the International Space Station, researchers have publicly released the first scientific data from the mission.

“They’re doing this,” said Rudderjarlis, a lead researcher for mission and physics professor at Utah State University. “This is a way of looking at the gravitational waves in the atmosphere that has never been captured before.”

Data releases available online include nighttime aeros and more than 5 million individual images of atmospheric gravity wave observations collected by the instrument’s four cameras, as well as bands of derived temperatures and air glow intensity for the ambient air and waves.

“We are awe program scientist at NASA headquarters in Washington,” said Esayas Shume, awe program scientist at NASA’s headquarters. “We are excited to share this influential dataset with the larger scientific community and look forward to what will be discovered.”

Atmospheric gravitational waves occur naturally in the Earth’s atmosphere and are formed by the Earth’s weather and topography. Scientists have been studying mysterious phenomena for years, mainly from several selected locations on the surface.

“With adoring data, we can now begin studying near-global measurements and waves and their energy and momentum on scales ranging from dozens to hundreds and even thousands of kilometers,” Scherliess said. “This opens a whole new chapter in this field of research.”

Data from AWE provides insight into how terrestrial and spatial weather interactions affect satellite communication, navigation and tracking.

“We rely heavily on satellites in our daily applications, such as GPS navigation,” Scherliess says. “Adoration is an attempt to focus on the science of atmospheric gravitational waves and use that information to better predict spatial weather that can disrupt satellite communications. Work closely with collaborators to better understand how these observed gravitational waves affect spatial weather.”

The tuba-shaped we adore known as the Advanced Mesosphere Thermal Mapper or AMTM consists of four identical telescopes. It is attached to the outside of the International Space Station, where the Earth’s scenery is located.

When the space station puts Earth in orbit, AMTM’s telescopes acquire a band 7,000 miles long on the planet’s surface, recording images of atmospheric gravitational waves as they move from the low atmosphere into space. AMTM measures and records the brightness of light at a specific wavelength. This can be used to create temperature maps of air and waves. These maps can reveal the energy of these waves and how they move through the atmosphere.

To analyze and publish the data, USU AWE researchers and students have developed new software to tackle challenges they have never encountered before.

“The clouds and reflections from the ground can blur some images. We want to make sure that the data provides a clear and accurate image of the power transported by the waves,” Sherliez said. “We also need to make sure that images coming from the four separate adoration telescopes on the mapper are properly aligned. Additionally, we need to make sure that the stray light reflections coming from the solar panels of the space station do not conceal the observations along with the moonlight and city light.”

As scientists advance their mission, they investigate how seasons and gravitational wave activity change around the world. Scherlies looks forward to how the global science community uses a respectful observation.

“The data collected through this mission provides unprecedented insight into the role of weather on earth in space weather,” he said.