UI physicists use specialized furnace to produce key piece of magnetic-field instrument

This furnace in the Miles Lab can bake objects to more than 2,900 degrees Fahrenheit, far hotter than lava. It's being used for a very specific purpose: to manufacture a critical space-instrument component for which there are almost no guidelines for production.

Suman Sherwani learned what it's like to press the button that sends a rocket soaring.The exhilarating moment was the culmination of a weeklong international field school where undergraduates design, build, and launch a 9-foot-tall rocket from Andøya Space Center in Andenes, Norway. Sherwani's experience through the Canada-Norway Student Sounding Rocket (CaNoRock) exchange program this past fall allowed her and other students from around the world to apply what they've learned in the classroom to a near-Earth mission.

University of Iowa physicists have won funding from NASA to design, build, and test a compact instrument that can measure a wider spectrum of magnetic fields in space.

University of Iowa undergraduates Hannah Gulick and Josh Larson took part in an intensive, international science program to design, build, and fly a sounding rocket.

This story from the University of Alberta's Folio newspaper describes Miles' work with CaNoRock, the Canada-Norway Student Sounding Rocket exchange program and the Investigation of Cusp Irregularities (ICI-4) mission. The goal of the ICI-4 campaign is to study space weather at high latitudes, and the interference it can have with GPS signals in the far North.