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Embry-Riddle's Dr. Kshitija Deshpande Wins Prestigious NSF Early Career Award
“Air traffic controllers need to know more about ionospheric impacts on communication,” she noted. “We have already seen some space weather events that caused rerouting of flights over the Arctic. At the same time, with more and more satellites being deployed into the space, it’s important to understand exactly what’s happening in the ionosphere. Satellites may get damaged due to the ionospheric structures, especially during solar storms.”
When scintillation events affect the GNSS, Deshpande and her students then work backwards, using reverse engineering techniques to find the conditions in the ionosphere that simulate a signal matching their observation. Because this is a painstaking and computationally challenging process, she hopes to harness machine learning to more rapidly analyze large amounts of data. Her goal is to characterize different scintillation events, pinpoint their source, and determine the likelihood of impacts on navigation and communication.
Advancing Education and Outreach
In addition to her research, Deshpande’s award-winning project involves introducing more students to the field. Toward that end, she plans to launch a course on how to apply data science and machine learning to space weather prediction.
For Aviation majors on the Daytona Beach Campus, she will also organize a workshop on space weather impacts on air traffic communication. Other education and outreach plans include collaborating with the Women in Science at Embry-Riddle program to incorporate a space weather component into summer school offerings.
Deshpande, who once had a HAM radio operator license in her home country of India, will team up with the Daytona Beach HAM radio club to get students and the local community interested in space weather and its effect on radio communication.
Why do we need space weather prediction?
“Plasma particles in the solar wind stream toward the Earth at 3 to 5 kilometers per second,” Deshpande pointed out. “If we knew when a storm was coming, we could take precautionary measures. We could put satellites in a low-power mode, to minimize impacts. We could reschedule space walks by astronauts on the International Space Station.”
Deshpande earned her Master’s and Ph.D. degrees from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, VA. She then served as a postdoctoral research associate at Virginia Tech before joining Embry-Riddle in 2016.
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