The Atmospheric Waves Experiment (AWE) is a

NASA The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agencies of the United States government, independent agency of the federal government of the United States, US federal government responsible for the United States ...

instrument to be mounted on the exterior of the

International Space Station The International Space Station (ISS) is a large space station that was Assembly of the International Space Station, assembled and is maintained in low Earth orbit by a collaboration of five space agencies and their contractors: NASA (United ...

(ISS) for the study of atmospheric

gravity wave In fluid dynamics, gravity waves are waves in a fluid medium or at the interface between two media when the force of gravity or buoyancy tries to restore equilibrium. An example of such an interface is that between the atmosphere and the oc ...

s (not to be confused with astrophysical

gravitational waves Gravitational waves are oscillations of the gravitational field that travel through space at the speed of light; they are generated by the relative motion of gravitating masses. They were proposed by Oliver Heaviside in 1893 and then later by H ...

). AWE was built by the

Utah State University Utah State University (USU or Utah State) is a public university, public land grant colleges, land-grant research university with its main campus in Logan, Utah, United States. Founded in 1888 under the Morrill Land-Grant Acts as Utah's federal ...

Space Dynamics Laboratory Space Dynamics Laboratory (SDL) is a nonprofit government contractor owned by Utah State University. SDL is the sole University Affiliated Research Center (UARC) for the United States Missile Defense Agency; and, is one of 15 UARCs in the nati ...

, and the mission is led by Michael Taylor of Utah State University. NASA selected AWE as an Explorers Program Mission of Opportunity in February 2019. The

SpaceX CRS-29 SpaceX CRS-29, also known as SpX-29, is a Commercial Resupply Service mission to the International Space Station (ISS) launched on 10 November 2023. The mission was contracted by NASA and flown by SpaceX using Cargo Dragon C211. It was the n ...

spacecraft carrying AWE was successfully launched on 10 November 2023. Once at the ISS, AWE will be extracted from the trunk section of the Cargo Dragon by the

Dextre Dextre, also known as the Special Purpose Dexterous Manipulator (SPDM), is a two-armed robot, or telemanipulator, which is part of the Mobile Servicing System on the International Space Station (ISS), and does repairs that would otherwise ...

robotic arm and attached to one of the station's Express Payload Adapter (ExPA), ELC-1 Site 3. After two years of observation at the ISS, AWE will be removed from the station and jettisoned to space, where it will be disposed of by reentering Earth's atmosphere to burn up.

Mission

Earth Earth is the third planet from the Sun and the only astronomical object known to Planetary habitability, harbor life. This is enabled by Earth being an ocean world, the only one in the Solar System sustaining liquid surface water. Almost all ...

's atmosphere, differences in air density cause atmospheric

s (AGWs). These AGWS are notable for traveling upward through the atmosphere carrying energy, eventually reaching space where they are hypothesized to affect the plasma environment surrounding Earth or

space weather Space weather is a branch of space physics and aeronomy, or heliophysics, concerned with the varying conditions within the Solar System and its heliosphere. This includes the effects of the solar wind, especially on the Earth's magnetosphere, ion ...

. Space weather is known for causing interference in satellite and communication signals, including

GPS The Global Positioning System (GPS) is a satellite-based hyperbolic navigation system owned by the United States Space Force and operated by Mission Delta 31. It is one of the global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) that provide geol ...

navigation. Thus, an understanding of AGWs and how they interact with space weather may contribute to improving the forecast of radio interference. When AGWs are in the realm of the atmosphere called the

mesopause The mesopause is the point of minimum temperature at the boundary between the mesosphere and the thermosphere atmospheric regions. Due to the lack of solar heating and very strong radiative cooling from carbon dioxide, the mesosphere is the c ...

, they produce light, a phenomenon known as

airglow Airglow is a faint emission of light by a planetary atmosphere. In the case of Earth's atmosphere, this optical phenomenon causes the night sky never to be completely dark, even after the effects of starlight and diffuse sky radiation, diffuse ...

. AWE will observe this airglow in infrared, with its location at the ISS allowing global coverage.

Instrument

AWE will be NASA's first instrument dedicated to heliophysics on the ISS. The AWE mission's hardware is the Advanced Mesospheric Temperature Mapper (AMTM), which consists of four identical

radiometer A radiometer or roentgenometer is a device for measuring the radiant flux (power) of electromagnetic radiation. Generally, a radiometer is an infrared radiation detector or an ultraviolet detector. Microwave radiometers operate in the micro ...

telescopes assembly. Each telescope has an

InGaAs Indium gallium arsenide (InGaAs) (alternatively gallium indium arsenide, GaInAs) is a ternary alloy (chemical compound) of indium arsenide (InAs) and gallium arsenide (GaAs). Indium and gallium are group III elements of the periodic table while ...

detector array on its

focal plane In Gaussian optics, the cardinal points consist of three pairs of points located on the optical axis of a rotationally symmetric, focal, optical system. These are the '' focal points'', the principal points, and the nodal points; there are two ...

References

External links

*
''AWE'' website
at nasa.gov {{Explorer program Components of the International Space Station Explorers Program International Space Station experiments Piggyback mission SpaceX payloads contracted by NASA 2023 in spaceflight