Seizing the cosmic moment

The great eclipse is behind us, but not for members of the Case Amateur Radio Club, who will long study what its shadows revealed.

The solar eclipse of April 8 offered a rare peek into the ionosphere, the region of the earth’s atmosphere that carries their radio waves over the horizon. Club members seized a research opportunity.

They reached out to licensed amateur radio operators along the path of the eclipse and asked them to join them in monitoring a single Canadian shortwave station — CHU in Ottawa, Ontario — during the eclipse. It happened to fall along the straight-line of the eclipse, which extended through Cleveland to Austin, Texas.

Using equipment designed and built at Case, five college and high school radio clubs agreed to monitor CHU’s signals, looking for changes in radio waves. Another 50 or so volunteers recorded signals with their own equipment. Now the terabytes of data await analysis.

“We don’t exactly know what we’ll see,” said Maris Usis, a radio club member and an electrical engineering major. “Ultimately, this is an experiment that hasn’t been done before with this level of equipment — and by a bunch of citizen scientists. I hope we’ll see something incredible.”

He plans to base his master’s thesis on the results, which may paint a better picture of the ionosphere, a highly charged region notoriously difficult to study.

“The eclipse gives as a unique opportunity,” explained club member Laura Schwartz, a fourth year electrical engineering major. “We get to separate out the sun’s extra ultraviolet radiation for a short period of time.”

That drastic, sudden switch in ionospheric conditions could be revealing, said club president Adam Goodman.

He and his fellow researchers feel pretty special. The next opportunity for such an experiment — the next time campus falls in the zone of totality of a full solar eclipse — will be in 420 years.