Swarms of low-resource sensors to probe the ionosphere

NASA is sponsoring a team developing a new type of payload to collect ionospheric plasma data at multiple points near a suborbital main payload. These low-resource, easily reproducible payloads—called Bobs—were developed for the NASA Isinglass auroral sounding rocket mission (conducted in February 2017 at the Poker Flat Research Range in Alaska). Much of the current understanding of the ionospheric environment has been gathered from singlepoint measurements. However, there are fundamental questions about energy and disturbances in plasmas that require measurements at many points in time to understand.