Rain delays at a sporting event. Tornado damage to a rural town in the Great Plains. Icy roads during a morning work commute in the winter months. We’ve all experienced the impacts of inclement weather, but did you know weather conditions high in our atmosphere also can affect our everyday lives? 

“While space weather can spark the beautiful auroras across our skies, it also has the potential to cause disruptions for us here on Earth and can be dangerous for our spacecraft and astronauts in space,” said Nicola Fox, associate administrator of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C. 

Space weather can interfere with satellite communications, GPS signals, and even our electrical grid, but there has been limited research about these complex factors in the upper atmosphere and how these factors are impacted by effects from the Earth’s surface.  

Virginia Tech researchers in the College of Engineering, along with several partners and collaborators, are seeking the answers to these relatively unexplored impacts that loom just beyond the clouds. With the help of a $2 million grant from NASA, they hope to use next generation instrumentation to shed light on the upper atmosphere and how its motions are driven by both the sun and weather at the Earth’s surface. 

“I could not be more proud of the team and the robust, comprehensive plan we put together to answer NASA’s DYNAMIC objectives," said principal investigator Scott Bailey, director of Space@VT and professor in the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. "I’m grateful for all of our partners, everyone who participated in the proposals, and Virginia Tech for supporting the effort at all levels of the administration.”

Step one: Three proposals. Nine months. $2 million. 

This is the first of a two-step selection process to investigate the complex region of space that surrounds our planet and how it’s influenced by Earth’s dynamic atmosphere. Virginia Tech is one of just three academic institutions selected, and future funding of $250 million — in 2023 dollars — will be up for grabs after the nine-month concept study is completed. 

“This project will address very important gaps in our knowledge with a data set that will revolutionize our understanding of the upper atmosphere and how different regions of the atmosphere affect each other,” Bailey said. 

Similar to the ocean, the upper atmosphere has tides that vary from day to day, Bailey said, but we’ve not been able to observe those variations because of limits in satellite technology. 

“Our novel design and use of multiple satellites will allow us to gather more data and see the changes in tides and other weather phenomena every three hours or so in comparison with previous instruments that could collect data only once every 24 hours,” Bailey said.

To make this project a success requires expertise in many areas: engineering and building the instruments, operating the instruments and the spacecraft, analyzing the data, knowledge of the dynamics and chemistry of the upper atmosphere, and expertise in running numerical simulations of the near-Earth space environment.

“A mission of this scope requires expertise and resources from different institutions," said Scott England, associate professor in the Kevin T. Crofton Department of Aerospace and Ocean Engineering and principal investigator on one of the three instruments. "The best people to put together the key elements of the spacecraft may be found at a university, a national lab, or a private company. We’ve done our best to find the individuals at the forefront of each of those disciplines and bring them together. For a project of this magnitude it takes many people working all across the U.S. to provide the breadth of expertise necessary to succeed.”

 Researchers seek to answer these questions:

  • How do upper atmospheric tides vary from day to day?
  • How are the lower and upper atmosphere coupled as part of an interconnected system?
  • How do influences from the sun compete with influences from meteorology near the Earth’s surface?
  • Which impacts on GPS, satellites in low Earth orbit, and global communications can occur from various space weather phenomena?
7 researchers stand with NASA poster.
Faculty researchers and proposal development support staff (from left) Justin Carstens, Brentha Thurairajah, Scott Bailey, Nicole Akers, Kathy Acosta, Megan Moore, and Aklima Khatun. Photo by Ben Murphy for Virginia Tech.

Step two: A DYNAMIC mission

The DYNAMIC mission is designed to make measurements within Earth’s upper atmosphere between about 50 to 125 miles, or 80 to 200 kilometers, in altitude. After a nine-month initial phase, NASA will select one proposed satellite technology for mission implementation. If chosen for flight, Virginia Tech’s proposed plan includes two satellites with state-of-the-art instrumentation, priced at $250 million in 2023 dollars for a duration of 10 years. 

“We designed a mission that uses two satellites instead of one, and a new technique that can collect data during day and night conditions," Bailey said. "Because the instrument looks out both sides of the two satellites, it can collect two to four times as much information as our competitors.”

With multiple spacecraft, DYNAMIC’s simultaneous observations from different locations will give scientists a more complete picture of how waves propagate upward through this part of the atmosphere, expanding our understanding of how space weather influences our home planet. 

"The DYNAMIC mission represents a groundbreaking effort to understand the intricate interplay between Earth's lower atmosphere and space weather. Our concept will deliver transformational observations, throughout the mesosphere and lower thermosphere, that will forever change the way we think about weather in the upper atmosphere," said Lynn Harvey, mission deputy principal investigator and research scientist at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Grant at a glance

Key partners

  • Virginia Tech's College of Engineering
  • University of Colorado, Boulder
  • Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas
  • Space Dynamics Laboratory in Logan, Utah
  • Global Atmospheric Technologies and Sciences in Newport News, Virginia
  • Computational Physics, Inc. in Boulder, Colorado
  • Other universities and government labs

The goals

Beyond understanding the intricacies of Earth’s upper atmosphere better, this technology could also help with increasing air traffic concerns from the number of satellites being launched. People have sent about 16,000 objects into space in the last 65 years. Since 2020, we have added almost 7,000 satellites with 2,600 of those launched in 2023 alone. Policies have not been created quickly enough to safely accommodate the exponential growth.

“When Elon Musk recently launched hundreds of satellites in a short time, there was a 1 percent chance that it would hit another satellite already in orbit, one in which Virginia Tech has a leadership role. That sounds small, but when you consider the cost of losing a satellite, this is a significant risk,” Bailey said. “As times go forward, this risk will only increase. Space regulation hasn’t been able to move fast enough to keep up with the influx of technology. Our mission could help address this situation and allow for better prediction of satellite orbits and better quantification of the risks." 

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