UCLA ELFIN Satellite

06/04/2024

Excited to compete in the NASA TechLeap competition by developing the Software Defined Payload Interface, a highly flexible power and digital interface which will serve in future UCLA CubeSat technologies! Go Bruins!

05/05/2023

KCRW's Steve Chiotakis interviewed UCLA researchers today on his program Greater LA. They shared about HARP, a new
NASA Sun Science project where the public can use their ears to help study and listen:

A new community science project from NASA and UCLA is teaching the public to listen to and identify the sounds of “space weather.”

04/18/2023

Check out the video trailer for our new public science tool, listen to magnetic waves and help us find new space weather phenomena!

Visit our website to check out HARP and help us find new plasma waves! http://listen.spacescience.orgInstagram CREDITS:HARP is supported ...

11/03/2022

Come by and see ELFIN this sunday!! Free science fun for all ages!

10/05/2022

Are you interested in space exploration? We are looking for eager engineers to join ELFIN, a team working on future multi-million dollar NASA-funded space research projects at UCLA. You will have the opportunity to gain important industry skills while learning from a great team of mentors. Learn more about the ELFIN mission here (https://elfin.igpp.ucla.edu/) and apply here (https://elfin.igpp.ucla.edu/apply) by October 15! Don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any further questions!

10/01/2022

End of an era + goodbye to a world. Link in bio to our Newsroom feature. There is a lot we could say, but we’ll let some of the final messages our team sent to our favorite satellites speak for themselves. All the love and admiration for those who worked on the mission, as well as those who supported the mission + those working on it. Ad astra.

09/30/2022

As of this morning ELFIN-B became one with the ionosphere...
Rest in Plasma, little friend 🥰🛰🧲🌎🌞

We plan to have a celebration of life hybrid event and party at EPSS last week of October, will provide more details soon.

Two CubeSats monitoring space radiation since 2018 have returned to Earth as shooting stars, next generation is coming.

09/27/2022

Congrats to the LICIA Cubesat team for their successful image capture of the DART asteroid impact yesterday!

In other news, you may have heard that we lost ELFIN-A last Saturday, and ELFIN-B only has a few days left... we will update you all soon on the status 🍞. It was an amazing 4 year run and the data are still being pored over, so ELFIN will live on in our hearts and publications!

09/13/2022

Happy Moon Festival! 🌕 Sept 10 2022 marks the final science collections ELFIN-A will be making in a grand magnetic conjunction with the THEMIS and ARTEMIS probes since ARTEMIS is perfectly aligned in the magnetotail. We expect ELFIN-A to survive ~7 more days.

“Happy Moon Festival! Sept 10 2022 marks the final science collections ELFIN-A will be making in a grand magnetic conjunction with the THEMIS and ARTEMIS probes since ARTEMIS is perfectly aligned in the magnetotail. We expect ELFIN-A to survive ~7 more days. ”

08/29/2022

The rise and fall in the strength of the magnetic field in the solar wind induces electric currents in the moon, and those electric currents in turn generate magnetic fields that will be measured by Danuri. The characteristics of the magnetic field will give hints of the structure and composition of the moon’s interior.

This work also requires combining measurements with those made by two NASA spacecraft, THEMIS-ARTEMIS P1 and P2, which travel around the moon on highly elliptical orbits, so they can measure the changes in the solar wind while Danuri measures the induced magnetic fields closer to the surface.

“What we would learn from that is kind of a global map of the interior temperature and potentially composition and maybe even water content of the deep parts of the moon,” Dr. Garrick-Bethel said.

The Danuri spacecraft, which launched on Thursday, aims to provide a lunar scientific bounty while preparing the country’s small space program for future exploration.

08/03/2022

“Human civilization has been extending from our Earth-based domain into the heliosphere, or the domain of the sun,” Guhathakurta says. “We are no longer simply observing an environment which is beyond our reach, but we are actually living in it, doing commerce in it, and traveling in it. Therefore, we have to really gain the level of understanding that is required to develop and inhabit this new world.”

Geomagnetic storms, solar flares, and other forms of space weather are increasingly causing power outages and satellite issues, but only because there are more devices to disrupt.

06/30/2022

"WHEN THE NEXT solar storm approaches Earth and the deep-space satellite provides its warning—maybe an hour in advance, or maybe 15 minutes, if the storm is fast-moving—alarms will sound on crewed spacecraft. Astronauts will proceed to cramped modules lined with hydrogen-rich materials like polyethylene, which will prevent their DNA from being shredded by protons in the plasma. They may float inside for hours or days, depending on how long the storm endures.

The plasma will begin to flood Earth’s ionosphere, and the electron bombardment will cause high-frequency radio to go dark. GPS signals, which are transmitted via radio waves, will fade with it. Cell phone reception zones will shrink; your location bubble on Google Maps will expand. As the atmosphere heats up, it will swell, and satellites will drag, veer off course, and risk collision with each other and space debris. Some will fall out of orbit entirely. Most new satellites are equipped to endure some solar radiation, but in a strong enough storm, even the fanciest circuit board can fry. When navigation and communication systems fail, the commercial airline fleet—about 10,000 planes in the sky at any given time—will attempt a simultaneous grounding."

Every so often, our star fires off a plasma bomb in a random direction. Our best hope the next time Earth is in the crosshairs? Capacitors.