Tropospheric sounding with low-cost particulate matter sensors

The high-altitude balloon (HAB) platform has allowed scientists to measure vertical profiles in the atmosphere at a relatively low cost. The current project combines the HAB platform with low-cost air quality sensors that measure particulate matter (PM). PM is detrimental to human health and can exacerbate asthma. In the atmosphere, PM can affect cloud formation and also radiative transfer, which links emissions of PM to climate change. Therefore, understanding and controlling PM emissions is vital to air quality and climate change. In agricultural regions, several practices produce significant PM emissions. Tilling can release PM in the form of dust, especially under arid conditions. The burning of crop residue is also a common practice practice that releases PM in the form of partially combusted organics (soot). The ultimate goal of this project is to use low-cost PM sensors and HAB to assess PM sources from agricultural regions using citizen scientists. The current presentation evaluates the performance of two different PM sensors over flights conducted during the summer of 2017

A Morphological and Multicolor Survey for Faint QSOs in the Groth-Westphal Strip

Quasars representative of the populous faint end of the luminosity function are frustratingly dim with m~24 at intermediate redshift; moreover groundbased surveys for such faint QSOs suffer substantial morphological contamination by compact galaxies having similar colors. In order to establish a more reliable ultrafaint QSO sample, we used the APO 3.5-m telescope to take deep groundbased U-band CCD images in fields previously imaged in V,I with WFPC2/HST. Our approach hence combines multicolor photometry with the 0.1" spatial resolution of HST, to establish a morphological and multicolor survey for QSOs extending about 2 magnitudes fainter than most extant groundbased surveys. We present results for the "Groth-Westphal Strip", in which we identify 10 high likelihood UV-excess candidates having stellar or stellar-nucleus+galaxy morphology in WFPC2. For m(606)<24.0 (roughly B<24.5) the surface density of such QSO candidates is 420 (+180,-130) per square degree, or a surface density of 290 (+160,-110) per square degree with an additional V-I cut that may further exclude compact emission line galaxies. Even pending confirming spectroscopy, the observed surface density of QSO candidates is already low enough to yield interesting comparisons: our measures agree extremely well with the predictions of several recent luminosity function models.Comment: 29 pages including 6 tables and 7 figures. As accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal (minor revisions

A New Graduate Space Science Course for Urban Elementary and Middle School Teachers at DePaul University in Chicago

This paper focuses on a new graduate space science course for urban elementary and middle school teachers. The course combines science content with pedagogy and classroom applications and is co-taught by a university science faculty member and a K-12 science teacher. We found that teachers who try to bring space science to their classrooms face a number of challenges. These include lack of content knowledge, low expectation of the students’ behavior and cognitive abilities, lack of administrative support, regimentation and structure of teaching set up by the schools, and lack of time during the school day to learn from each other and share questions about science and teaching. We found that because we addressed these challenges as part of the course, many teachers were able to overcome them

Using Asteroid Scale Models in Space Science Education for Blind and Visually Impaired Students

A major obstacle confronting blind and visually impaired students in their science education is the inaccessibility to graphical materials that are critically instructive and abundantly available to sighted students. The use of three-dimensional models can effectively address this problem. Specifically, this article discusses how scale models of near-Earth asteroids can be used to teach space science to blind and visually impaired students. The models, published in the peer-reviewed literature and in almost every case based on radar observations, are developed with a rapid prototyping process. With these models, many of the recent exciting discoveries about near-Earth asteroids suddenly are directly accessible to blind and visually impaired people. Recent research has shown that many sighted students also learn better when their haptic sense is engaged

Low-cost HAB platform to measure particulate matter in the troposphere

High-altitude balloons (HABs) are an engaging platform for formal and informal STEM education. However, the logistics of launching, chasing and recovering a payload on a 1200 g or 1500 g balloon can be daunting for many novice school groups and citizen scientists, and the cost can be prohibitive. In addition, there are many interesting scientific applications that do not require reaching the stratosphere. In this poster presentation we discuss a novel approach based on small (30 g) balloons that are cheap and easy to handle, and low-cost tracking devices (SPOT and 900 MHz spread spectrum) that do not require a license. Our scientific goal is to measure air quality in the lower troposphere. Particulate matter (PM) is an air pollutant that varies on small spatial scales and has sources in rural areas like biomass burning and farming practices such as tilling. Our HAB platform incorporates an optical PM sensor, an integrated single board computer that records the PM sensor signal in addition to flight parameters (pressure, location and altitude), and a low-cost tracking system. Our goal is for the entire platform to cost less than $500