CLEVELAND — The upcoming eclipse offers all sorts of opportunities for us to discover more about how our universe works.
While many will watch the Moon and Sun share the spotlight that day, some students at Case Western Reserve University are focused on the space between, specifically the hundreds of miles far above the clouds but below outer space known as the ionosphere.
Members of the Case Amateur Radio Club, known as W8EDU, are among those across the country and the globe set to test what happens when the Moon gets in the way of the sun and how that impacts (or doesn't) radio communications.
It's all a part of the Ham Radio Science Citizen Investigation known as HamSCI.
As W8EDU President Adam Goodman explained, the ionosphere is the stretch of the earth's atmosphere where GPS and radio signals travel and can be difficult to study.
"It’s too high for planes to go but too low for spaceships to be in there," the fourth-year electrical engineering student said. "It’s this very awkward area."
Goodman explained that ham radio enthusiasts are set to communicate with each other during the eclipse to see just how far radio messages can travel during an eclipse.
"We just got so lucky with this experiment," he said. "We’re going to see who can receive signals at what time and therefore be able to study does the eclipse increase our ability or decrease our ability [to transmit and receive messages]?"
"There’s this mysterious layer around the Earth that allows us to hear people around the world and we don’t know how it works 100% and we’re going to learn new things about it from this research," electrical engineering master's student Maris Usis added.
Totality for the solar eclipse is slated to begin a little after 3 p.m. on Monday, April 8.
Those in the club admit they're not sure what to expect during the experiment and once all the data is gathered.
"That’s part of the fun," applied mathematics Ph.D. student Rachel Boedicker said. "That’s why we do science. Studying the ionosphere tells us more about that communication channel and this is a good time to do that because we have one isolated event we can control."
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