WHY CAN YOU RECEIVE AM RADIO BETTER AT NIGHT THAN DURING THE
DAY?
This question will hopefully start as the jumping off point for you and your students
into an exploration of the principles of radio transmissions, atomic structures,
electromagnetic waves, the ionosphere, and the state-of-the-art remote sensing
capabilities.
This lesson can be used as part of several different courses. It can be used as
the introduction to the ionosphere in an earth science course studying the atmosphere.
It can be used to expand on ideas of electromagnetic waves. It can even be
used to demonstrate remote sensing in a technology based course.
The focal point of this exercise is the Millstone
Hill Observatory Incoherent Scattering Radar located at the MIT-Haystack Observatory in Westford, Massachusetts
(shown below). This instrument is able to analyze the ionosphere to determine
electron densities, electron and ion temperatures, and ion velocities. Students,
through the Internet, will have access to actual data from the observatory and will
observe an experiment in progress!

The lesson is a hands on program which encourages the students to answer questions on
their own. Exercises are presented for them to do at home and there are many places
where use if the Internet is integrated into the program. The culmination of the
program will be the analysis of real-time data from the observatory, an example of which
is shown below:

A detailed one week lesson plan has been developed to help
guide you on your journey. This provides detailed daily lesson plans along with
suggested Internet links, worksheets, and assessment tools.
In addition a page of Background Information is located at
this site. Although this lesson is intended to stand on its own, many teachers may
want to strengthen their knowledge of the material (in order to better handle students
questions!) or broaden the scope of the lessons by adding additional enrichment
material. This page provides links to many sites which help explain the topics
covered in this lesson.
There is much concern in schools today about meeting state and national curriculum
frameworks and standards. This site was developed to specifically address the Massachusetts Curriculum
Frameworks and the National
Science Curriculum Standards. It does so by meeting both content requirements
and methodology requirements. The lesson provides an opportunity to review many
concepts, such as atomic structure, wave propagation, atmospheric structured, and
electromagnetic fields and apply them in a new way. In addition, it provides an
inquiry based lesson, which is the foundation of all curriculum reform.
More than anything else, we long for your opinions about this site. If you have
any thoughts of improvements that we can make or, even better, can share some of your
classes responses with us, please send us an e-mail at: jyuhas@haystack.mit.edu. Each part of the
lesson plan concludes with a listing of experiences from teachers that have tried this
lesson plan.
This site has been developed by the Millstone
Hill Observatory, part the MIT-Haystack
facility located in Westford, MA, under a grant from the National
Science Foundation.
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