Collaborative Research: RAPID--EclipseMob - Crowdsourcing a Spatial Temporal Study of Low Frequency Propagation Effects Due to a Total Solar Eclipse

几个世纪以来，日全食为研究太阳和地球大气提供了独特的机会。这种情况在美国大陆很少发生。2017年8月，一场日食将席卷整个国家的心脏和整个大陆。日食在大气中提供了一段相对平静的时期，因为来自太阳的辐射被月球挡住了。该项目将充分利用众包技术和廉价的现代技术来测量高层大气(电离层)对低频无线电波的响应，从而使人们对尚未很好了解的大气特征有了新的见解。这个项目对国家利益很重要，因为众所周知，对电离层的干扰会调制无线电波，在某些极端情况下，会完全阻断无线电波。该项目还通过让从高中生到研究生院的学生和普通公众参与来扩大科学参与。此外，该项目由一个由少数族裔科学家组成的跨学科团队领导。两个地点(加利福尼亚州萨克拉门托的迪克森海军无线电发射机设施和科林斯堡的国家标准与技术研究所)的发射机将以低频(LF)进行广播，探测电离层的D和E区域。美国大陆各地由学生和公众安装和操作的接收器将收集给定频率的幅度数据。这些接收器的子集也将收集相变数据。这个项目的目标是利用收集到的数据来研究日食路径和发射器-接收器对的相对距离/位置对幅度和相位变化的影响。收集的数据将与佐治亚理工学院的低频无线电实验室合作处理，以研究D层和E层的电离和复合行为。收集到的结果和数据将通过NikpseMob网站向公众公布。

For centuries, total solar eclipses have provided unique opportunities to study the Sun and the Earths atmosphere. They rarely occur across the continental United States. In August of 2017, an eclipse will travel through the heart of the nation and across the entire continent. Eclipses provide a period of relative quiet in the atmosphere as the radiation from the sun is blocked by the moon. This project will take full advantage of crowdsourcing techniques and inexpensive modern technologies to measure the response of the upper atmosphere (the ionosphere) to low frequency radio waves, thus giving new insight into characteristics of the atmosphere that are not well understood. This project is important to national interests as disturbances to the ionosphere are known to modulate radio waves and in some extreme cases, block them entirely. This project also broadens scientific participation through its involvement of students from high school through graduate school and the general public. Additionally, the project is led by an interdisciplinary team of scientists from underrepresented minorities. Transmitters in two locations (Dixon Naval Radio Transmitter Facility in Sacramento, CA and National Institute of Standards and Technology in Fort Collins, CO) will broadcast at low frequencies (LF), probing the D and E regions of the ionosphere. Receivers across the continental US installed and manned by students and the general public will collect the amplitude data at the given frequencies. A subset of these receivers will also collect phase change data. The goal of this project is to use the collected date to examine how the amplitude and phase changes are affected by eclipse path and the relative distance/locations of the transmitter-receiver pairs. The data collected will be processed in collaboration with the LF Radio Lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology for ionization and recombination behavior of the D and E layers. The results and the data collected will be publicly available through the EclipseMob web presence.