MOSCOW, August 13. A new device for studying the ionosphere, which will help ensure reliable short-wave communications for civil aviation and the Ministry of Emergency Situations, was developed and launched at several testing sites by scientists from UNN. The results of the work are presented in the scientific journal Atmosphere.
The Earth's atmosphere has a layered structure: each layer has a different gas composition and temperature, said specialists from the Research Institute of Radiophysics of the Nizhny Novgorod State University named after N.I. Lobachevsky (NIRFI UNN).
Scientists believe that the most interesting region of the atmosphere from the point of view of radio communications is the ionosphere (80-1000 km from the Earth's surface), where charged particles are located — ions, free radicals and electrons. The ionosphere has a complex structure and is subject to changes that occur on time scales from several seconds to several years.
The state of this layer of the atmosphere can have a significant impact on the propagation of radio waves. The most sensitive to changes in the ionosphere is short-wave radiation (with a frequency of 3–30 MHz), on which several hundred radio stations broadcast and long-range aircraft communicate with dispatchers.
However, according to scientists from NIRFI UNN , there are not enough ionospheric monitoring devices located on the territory of Russia to make a short-term and medium-term radio communication forecast based on their data.
To solve this problem, they developed an ionosonde to obtain fundamental and applied knowledge about the ionosphere. In their opinion, a network of such probes will not only answer questions about the physics of the ionosphere, but can also reduce the time it takes to establish a communication channel from a minute to a few seconds.
«
"In our country, ionosondes available to scientific organizations can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Our approach is to create a simple but multifunctional device with the lowest possible cost, so that already at the testing stage we can obtain new scientific results not only at one observation point, but also based on data from a small network of observation points," said one of the authors of the study, Director of the UNN Research Institute of Radiophysics Alexey Shindin.
The scientist added that ionosondes are currently deployed at five sites, and three more sites will be added to them in the near future.
«During the pilot operation and resource tests, we obtain new data on the velocities of vertical movements of electron plasma in the ionosphere. In the future, we will be able to monitor large-scale horizontal movements,» Shindin added.
The researcher explained that one device combines the functions of several scientific instruments. Among them are a pulse ionosonde, an ionosonde using a continuous frequency-modulated signal, and a wideband short-wave transmitting and receiving device.
«As far as we know, there is currently no other ionosonde that simultaneously implements the functions of a pulse ionosonde and an ionosonde with linear frequency modulation. In addition, our device has an open specification and is based on available components,» he noted.
In the future, scientists plan to add new functionality to the developed device.
The development and construction of the new ionosonde was carried out with the support of the Priority-2030 program of the Russian national project «Science and Universities», of which UNN is a participant.
Свежие комментарии