Summer Students Scan the Radio Skies with SunRISE

Solar radio bursts, intense blasts of radio emission associated with solar flares, can wreak havoc on global navigation systems. Now, as part of the Ground Radio Lab campaign led by the University of Michigan and NASA’s SunRISE (Sun Radio Interferometer Space Experiment) mission, which is managed by the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, […]

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May 28, 2025 - 21:00
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Summer Students Scan the Radio Skies with SunRISE
A woman presents a scientific poster titled “Solar Radio Burst Events Detected by the SunRISE Ground Radio Lab” to a man at a conference. The poster includes graphs, charts, and images related to solar radio bursts, with sections labeled
L. Y. Zhou, a senior at Skyline High School, Ann Arbor, MI, representing the SunRISE Ground Radio Lab (GRL) summer research project team at the Solar Heliospheric and INterplanetary Environment (SHINE) conference, held in Juneau, AK in August 2024. Other contributing high school students were S. Rajavelu-Mohan (Washtenaw Technical Middle College, Ann Arbor, MI), M. I. Costacamps-Rivera (Centro Residencial de Oportunidades Educativas de Mayagüez, Mayagüez, PR), E. Schneider (Marquette Senior High School, Marquette, MI), and L. Cui (Skyline High School, Ann Arbor, MI).

Solar radio bursts, intense blasts of radio emission associated with solar flares, can wreak havoc on global navigation systems. Now, as part of the Ground Radio Lab campaign led by the University of Michigan and NASA’s SunRISE (Sun Radio Interferometer Space Experiment) mission, which is managed by the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, high school and college students across the nation are collecting, processing, and analyzing space weather data to help better understand these bursts. 

Participating students have presented their findings at local science fairs and national conferences, including the Solar Heliospheric and INterplanetary Environment (SHINE) conference held in Juneau, Alaska in August 2024. These students sifted through thousands of hours of observations to identify and categorize solar radio bursts.  

Your school can get involved too! 

Participating high schools receive free, self-paced online training modules sponsored by the SunRISE mission that cover a range of topics, including radio astronomy, space physics, and science data collection and analysis. Students and teachers participate in monthly webinars with space science and astronomy experts, build radio telescopes from kits, and then use these telescopes to observe low frequency emissions from the Sun and other objects like Jupiter and the Milky Way. 

Visit the Ground Radio Lab website to learn more about the new campaign and apply to participate.

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Last Updated
May 28, 2025

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