In the presence of a uniform, perpendicular magnetic field, a phenomenon known as normal field instability (NFI) occurs in a ferrofluid. The theory describing the NFI identifies a critical magnetic field below which no magnetically driven surface deformations occur. This critical field depends on the gravitational acceleration and, according to the theory, should disappear as local gravitational acceleration approaches zero. Previous studies have been inconclusive on the existence of a critical magnetic field in reduced gravity. For our work, we designed a payload for a suborbital rocket mission which launched through the RockSat-C program. Our experiment incorporated a ferrofluid sample and a uniform magnetic field which could be varied across a discrete range of value. During the microgravity portion of the rocket's flight, we obtained video of the ferrofluid's behavior to compare it to data taken in Earth's gravity.
In an attempt to observe how very low frequency (VLF) signals from lightning discharges vary as a function of altitude, a sounding rocket payload was built and launched via the Colorado Space Grant Consortium's RockSat-X program. The main components of the payload consisted of three magnetic field antennas, two pairs of electric field plate antennas, an amplification and filtration circuit board, and two microSD cards interfaced with high performance multi-core microcontrollers for data storage. Despite a flight anomaly preventing the retrieval of the stored data, low resolution telemetry data from flight shows the expected presence power line interference.
The Astronomy Magazine Fellowship, funded by the Wisconsin Space Grant Consortium, was an opportunity to work with Astronomy Magazine at Kalmbach Publishing in Waukesha, Wisconsin for 10 weeks in the summer of 2016 as the first student science writer.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.