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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!

millstone for web.jpg (65617 bytes)

 

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:

sample local f scan.gif (25709 bytes)

 

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.