The VSGC Undergraduate STEM Research Scholarship Program provides awards of up to $8,500 to rising juniors and seniors who are enrolled full-time in a program of study in science, technology, engineering, or math (STEM) and have a specific faculty-mentored research project that has NASA or aerospace relevance. Application deadline is February 5, 2018. See http://www.vsgc.odu.edu/sf/undergrad/

The Virginia Space Grant Consortium (VSGC) Graduate Research STEM Fellowship Program provides fellowships of $6,000 in add-on support to graduate students to supplement and enhance basic research support. Applicants must be Student at NASA enrolled full-time in a program of study in science, technology, engineering, or math (STEM) and have a specific faculty-mentored research project that has NASA or aerospace relevance. Application deadline is February 5, 2018. See
http://www.vsgc.odu.edu/sf/gradfellow/

The Virginia Space Grant Consortium (VSGC) has announced that applications are being accepted for $1,000 STEM Bridge Scholarships to sophomores from any federally recognized minority group. Students must be enrolled full-time in a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) program at one of the five Virginia Space Grant member universities. Awards are renewable for one year. The deadline for applications is March 12, 2018.

For more information, and to complete the online application for 2018-2019, please contact Joyce Kuberek at or visit: http://vsgc.odu.edu/sf/Bridge

There are opportunities for undergrad students to participate as summer interns in research carried out by Space@VT research groups. The website for Summer 2018 applications is now open. Please fill out the form and attach your resume at https://goo.gl/forms/48q0iyTzmuRWbCGB2

Submissions close on March 1st.

You can find a high-level list of research topics at https://space.vt.edu/research.html.

A new version of the radar software toolkit (RST) has been released by the Data Analysis Working Group and can be found on the working group's github repository as version 4.1. Some major changes come with this new version including the deprecation of the '-new' flag in favor of using '-old' for data formats prior to 20060701 (*.dat, *.fit, etc.). The '-new' flag will no longer work and may break processing if used, so please update any external processing code.

In addition, RST 4.1 comes with major revisions to the gridding and mapping software. This means RST 4.1 will no longer produce the grdex and mapex files that are found on the VT-SuperDARN website. New files produced with the RST 4.1 code will be called grid2 and map2. These new files retain much of the same format as grdex and mapex files but are being separated to distinguish between the major revisions in the gridding and mapping software. RST 4.1 does maintain backwards compatibility so grdex and mapex files should be read and plotted with the current code.

Lastly, RST 4.1 introduces fitacf 3.0 as an experimental option of processing rawacf files into fitacf files. The default for this processing remains with fitacf 2.5, but users have the option to process what we at Virginia Tech are calling fitacf3 files with the command 'make_fit -fitacf-version 3.0'.

For now, grdex and mapex files will be produced to the end of 2017. Grid2 and map2 files will be produced starting with the beginning of 2017, but could be extended further back in time as necessary. Also, starting with the beginning of Dec. 2017, fitacf3 files will be produced in addition to fitacf (v2.5) files. Some of the web tools found on this website have been updated to plot this data. For the latest on what is available in the VT database, please refer to the data inventory page.

The Yasme Foundation Board of Directors has announced that Dr. Nathaniel Frissell, a former student in the VT SuperDARN group, and Magda Moses, a current Space@VT student, have received a Yasme Foundation 2017 Excellence Award. The award is for 'creating and leading the Ham Radio Science Citizen Investigation (HamSCI) organization that sponsored the Solar Eclipse QSO Party (SQEP)...the largest Amateur Radio experiment ever devised.' Nathaniel is now an assistant professor at NJIT and is preparing to ship out to Antarctica. The full text of the citation can be found at
http://www.arrl.org/news/yasme-foundation-announces-excellence-awards-and-supporting-grant and a related HamSCI article is posted at http://hamsci.org/article/w2naf-and-km4ege-win-yasme-foundation-excellence-award

Congratulations, Magda and Nathaniel! (Photo from the 2017 AGU Fall Meeting.)

Xueling Shi successfully sat her PhD Preliminary Exam on Monday, November 6 before a committee of six professors. Xueling has authored and co-authored papers using satellite and radar data to study ULF pulsations in the coupled magnetosphere-ionosphere system. She is currently performing a comprehensive survey of Pc3-4 and Pc5 pulsations using data collected by the SuperDARN radars operating in the high-resolution THEMIS mode. Xueling is a recipient of a prestigious 2017 NASA Earth and Space Fellowship. She now passes into PhD Candidate status.

Congratulations, Xueling!

Photo credit: Dong Lin