About this opportunity: Internships are educational hands-on opportunities that provide unique NASA-related research and operational experiences for educators and high school, undergraduate, and graduate students (age 16 and up). To learn more and apply, visit: SAGE III/ISS Mission Science Internship Application Deadline: February 28, 2025 This internship will involve analyses and problem solving related to the on-orbit operation of the SAGE III ISS mission. The Stratospheric Aerosol and Gas Experiment III (SAGE III) was delivered to the International Space Station on 23 February 2017 in the unpressurized trunk of the SpaceX CRS-10 Dragon spacecraft. The SAGE III ISS payload was installed on ELC-4 at the S3 Truss. SAGE III is an atmospheric remote sensing mission that combines solar occultation, lunar occultation, and limb scattering to retrieve vertical profiles of Earth’s atmospheric ozone, aerosols, and other trace gases and state parameters such as temperature and pressure. SAGE III utilizes a charge-coupled device (CCD) of 857 pixels in the spectral dimension of which 809 pixels correspond to approximately 1 nm wide wavelength bands ranging from 282 nm to 1038 nm. The remaining 48 pixels characterize readout noise on a per-measurement basis. An additional InGaAs photodiode channel collects a wider passband centered at 1543 nm. The CCD readout is table-configured to provide 86 channels for solar occultations and 340 channels for lunar occultations and limb scatter measurements. Finally, a spectral survey mode enables a full CCD spectral readout. The on-orbit configurability of the CCD readout process enables a test bed for transmission measurements tailored to experimental retrievals of specific species of interest beyond the nominal data product. For example, the strong vibronic structure of the Bromine Monoxide (BrO) extinction cross section in the ultraviolet makes this species a prime candidate for study. Nighttime species can be targeted during lunar occultations. SAGE III is also equipped with a Disturbance Monitoring Package (DMP) and two Contamination Monitoring Packages (CMPs). These subsystems provide characterization of vibrational disturbance and attitude change events as well as monitoring of particulate and molecular contamination. The DMP is a Miniature Inertial Measurement Unit (MIMU) which measures rotation in inertial space in three axes using Ring Laser Gyros (RLGs). The ISS Program approved two SAGE III attitude maneuver requests performed 10-16 April and 29-30 June 2017 to calibrate observations made between the main science instrument’s Sun-tracking measurements and the DMP’s RLGs. The DMP has been used to aid science data retrievals by improving pointing knowledge through better relative attitude determination, and a Kalman-filtered research product will be used for absolute attitude determination. DMP measurements are used to characterize ISS bending as a function of attitude on ELC-4. The student will work on atmospheric science retrievals from the on-orbit instrument including challenging work involving instrument characterization, attitude determination problems, ISS mission con ops, and data analysis. Work could aid in the development of the SAGE IV Pathfinder mission. The students will produce research-quality analyses and analysis software and will be expected to work in a team environment to produce systems engineering reports and white papers on the work.
