Heads in the Clouds: Utah High School Students Analyze Novel Data From USU Instrument Aboard ISS
Aggie physicists collaborate with Salt Lake City's East High teens to develop a machine learning model for direct-from-space atmospheric waves analysis.
By Mary-Ann Muffoletto |
Video by Taylor Emerson, Digital Journalist, University Marketing & Communications
Salt Lake City’s East High School may be most well known as the filming location of Disney’s popular “High School Musical” movie trilogy and TV series. Located about 4 miles southwest of the State Capitol Building, the secondary school is also the alma mater of Utah’s 92-year-old favorite son Jake Garn, veteran shuttle astronaut, airman and U.S. senator.
But a new chapter for the notable high school is beginning with a group of budding statisticians who are analyzing never-before-seen, direct-from-space data transmitted from a Utah State University Space Dynamics Laboratory-built instrument strapped to the Earth-facing exterior of the International Space Station. Launched to the ISS in November 2023, the NASA-funded Atmospheric Waves Experiment (AWE) mission’s tuba-shaped Advanced Mesospheric Temperature Mapper (AMTM) is collecting millions of images of atmospheric waves and temperature measurements with its four telescopes as it orbits the Earth 15 times a day.
The overall goal of the mission is to better understand, by examining atmospheric waves, how weather on earth influences space weather, which can adversely affect aircraft, spacecraft and GPS navigational systems.
“I think it’s incredible that we’re a part of this mission,” says East High junior Yamato Lerwill. “It’s a really unique opportunity that no other high schoolers that I know of are being able to do. We’re so lucky.”
Lerwill is among about 30 juniors and seniors in teacher and USU alum ShaunMicheal Bartschi’s advanced placement statistics class, who are learning to analyze data using a training data set and machine learning model, developed by USU Physics AWE Science Mission scholars Dallin Tucker and Anh Phan, respectively; to test the data’s accuracy.
Differentiating clouds from atmospheric waves is a significant challenge as the researchers view the collected data. With the machine learning algorithm, the East High School scholars will practice sifting through huge portions of data to determine whether or not clouds are present in the collected images.
Bartschi, who sought university-level research for his students, says he was “absolutely giddy,” when he was invited by friend and USU doctoral student and AWE Science Mission team member Anastasia King-Brown to collaborate with the USU physicists.
“The idea that my students could be some of the first people in the world to see a particular data set was mind-blowing,” he says. “It’s also exciting that we don’t exactly know how things are going to turn out. Our students are engaging in original research and making world-first observations. It’s an incredible opportunity.”
Bartschi says the project strikes a key chord in statistical learning.
“There is not one area of life that isn’t touched by statistics at some point,” he says. “Statistics is all about understanding randomness in the world around us, as well as taking some very big problems and trying to understand them a little at a time.”
King-Brown, who is a 2024 NASA Utah Space Grant Consortium Graduate Research Fellow, says technological advances, including the AWE mission’s AMTM’s capabilities, are enabling collection of massive amounts of scientific information. Analyzing the flood of data, however, remains a formidable challenge.
“There’s a lot of areas of science where you’re just drowning in data because it’s easy to collect data, but there’s only a finite amount of human time and energy to analyze it,” she says. “That’s where machine learning can help us and why it’s important for students to learn how to harness this important tool.”
Both King-Brown and Bartschi, along with King-Brown’s USU faculty mentor Ludger Scherliess, AWE Mission principal investigator, and other team members, recognize the small seeds of learning planted at East High can be replicated into countless projects, disseminated by NASA and partners, to be pursued by teens in schools throughout the nation.
Bartschi, who is a National Science Foundation Noyce Teaching Fellow working in a separate grant-funded project with USU mathematics professor and Associate Dean Brynja Kohler, says the project is an ideal fit for Noyce program efforts to empower secondary teachers throughout Utah, particularly in remote areas, with meaningful STEM teaching tools to inspire high school students and prepare them for collegiate success.
King-Brown says getting young people involved in science, including teaching them how to conduct research, is critical for instilling confidence and guiding them toward a wide variety of educational opportunities.
“Back when I was in high school telling people I wanted to be a physicist, they really couldn’t envision what kind of career I could pursue other than teaching,” King-Brown says. “Teaching is a wonderful profession, but it’s just one of many exciting paths for physicists and other scientists.”
Bartschi says the AWE project is an ideal project for his students, regardless of their future educational and professional pursuits.
“This project allows them to be part of something so much bigger than themselves,” he says. ‘I hope they come away feeling they’ve accomplished something that advances science and makes a global impact.”
WRITER
Mary-Ann Muffoletto
Public Relations Specialist
College of Science
435-797-3517
maryann.muffoletto@usu.edu
CONTACT
ShaunMicheal Bartschi
Noyce Teaching Fellow
USU Department of Mathematics and Statistics
ShaunMicheal.Bartschi@slcschools.org
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