Geospace Projects

Haystack’s Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences group has a significant experimental and remote sensing program with a strong and productive history. We are always pursuing many projects, highlighted here, that span the disciplines of remote sensing as applied to near-Earth space across a wide span of electromagnetic frequencies.

Millstone Hill Incoherent Scatter Radar

Incoherent scatter radar (ISR) has proved to be the most powerful and flexible ground-based instrument for probing the dynamics of thermal plasma in Earth’s ionosphere.

Madrigal Geospace Database

An upper-atmospheric science database at Haystack used by groups throughout the world. Madrigal manages archival and real-time data from a wide range of upper-atmospheric science instruments.

Using GNSS to Measure Ionospheric TEC

GNSS systems for precision location yield as a by-product measurements of the total electron content (TEC) of the ionosphere. MIT makes this popular data available to the geospace community.

AERO-VISTA CubeSat mission

A NASA twin CubeSat mission for auroral radio science and space interferometry technology.

RAPID: Radio Array of Portable Interferometric Detectors

Advanced radio array designed for geospace and astronomy. The system implements a sparse and spatially diverse radio array technology to enable a wide range of scientific experiments.

Zephyr Meteor Radar Network

A novel multiple-input/multiple-output (MIMO) radar network designed to estimate the 3D wind field in the upper atmosphere by way of meteor trail scattering.

MACAWS: Monitors for Alaskan and Canadian Auroral Weather in Space

A sensor web network providing both real-time and historical GNSS TEC and scintillation data products.

Software-Defined Radio

A cornerstone technology for the rapid development of new geospace sensors and techniques.