 
Students Reach New Heights with Citizen Explorer Mission
Scheduled for launch in early 2000, the Citizen Explorer will measure atmospheric ozone and broadcast these measurements to hundreds of participating classrooms around the world. Classrooms, equipped with low-cost receivers and classroom computers, will immediately receive and display the satellite's measurements of ozone above their school and surrounding area. Using the Internet to exchange data with other schools, K-12 students can create regional and global maps of atmospheric ozone. The Citizen Explorer Mission is a project of the Colorado Space Grant Consortium, a NASA sponsored program based in the college of Engineering and Applied Science at CU-Boulder. An exceptional group of colleges and universities, industry and government partners, university faculty and students, and K-12 educators make up the support network for the mission. Students already are taking ground-based measurements of aerosol particles and ultraviolet radiation in the atmosphere using hand-held instruments built for the project by high school students and college freshmen. These ground measurements will be part of a central database at CU-Boulder that will add to our knowledge of the ozone layer by providing extensive geographical coverage to study both large-scale global phenomena and localized atmospheric trends. Using the ground-based readings along with the Citizen Explorer satellite data, the students will be able to determine how the amounts of atmospheric ozone and pollution affect the levels of UV radiation reaching the surface of the Earth. They'll be able to see for themselves that our atmosphere is not uniform and that it changes with season, location, and time of day. Increasing health risks associated with damage to our ozone layer make it important to measure ozone in the atmosphere and understand how the amount of UV radiation reaching the surface of the Earth is affected by ozone, particulates, and other factors. To learn more about the Citizen Explorer Mission, visit citizen-explorer.colorado.eduv.  Engineering Home |
A new space mission called the Citizen Explorer is bringing teaming, discovery, and hands-on learning into classrooms at every grade level. Students from CU-Boulder and 14 other colleges across Colorado, New Mexico, and Alaska are collaborating to build a small satellite, which will enable students, K-12 and above, to work together on a mission team to study the ozone in our atmosphere. College students are both developing the spacecraft and helping to teach students from elementary through high school about the spacecraft and its operation.