The Educate Utilizing CubeSat Experience (EdUCE) program was developed to cultivate practical hands-on K-20 Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) experiences via space systems engineering. Recently, the inclusion of the Arts (resulting in STEAM) has become a complementary effort to engage students in STEM activities and to motivate innovation in Systems Engineering curriculum and broaden the participation of K-20 students and educators worldwide. This paper discusses how the EdUCE program utilizes systematic approaches to implement its hands-on experiences to K-20 participants. These learning experiences were derived from a CubeSat project at the University of Florida. Original efforts to educate CubeSat concepts were through outreach activities such as designing and building a representative CubeSat class satellite with specific mission applications at engineering fairs and communication activities through the use of amateur radio equipment similar to tracking and commanding of satellites. In addition, this paper presents how the systems engineering processes are applied in the educational domain. Furthermore, the EdUCE experiences and derived content are delivered through a state-of-the-art digital platform.
We provide consistent theoretical and empirical assessments of the major driving factors of the information content and retrieval performance for current and potential future microwave (MW) sounders. For the specific instrument concepts assessed, we find that instrument noise is a major driver, impacting vertical resolution as measured by the degrees of freedom for signal as much as 50%. We also observe diminished performance in the 118 GHz temperature sounding band as compared to the 50–60 GHz band, which is largely due to the increased sensor noise in the assessed 118 GHz sensor for comparable channels—a reduction in the performance gap between 118 GHz and 50 GHz bands can be obtained with a reduction of instrument noise in the 118 GHz temperature sounding channels. As expected, scene-type also significantly impacts the vertical resolution, emphasizing the importance of separating clear, cloudy, rainy, and icy conditions when evaluating instrument performance.
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