Welcome to the CINDI Educational website

CINDI Logo medium sizeCindi spacegirl with dogs

The Coupled Ion Neutral Dynamics Investigation (CINDI) is a joint NASA/US Air Force funded ionospheric (upper atmosphere) plasma sensors built by the Center for Space Sciences at the University of Texas at Dallas. This instrument package is now flying on the Air Force's Communication/Navigation Outage Forecast Satellite (C/NOFS) launched in spring 2008. On this site you will find a collection of teaching and education resources for grades 6-9 about the CINDI project, the Earth's atmosphere, space weather, the scale in the Earth-Moon system, satellites and rockets and more.


Are you a Teacher in the Dallas/Fort Worth Area?

Come attend our CINDI workshops for middle and high school teachers at the Metroplex Area Conference for the Advancement of Science Teaching!


Saturday, February 21, 2009
8:30 am - 3:45 pm (registration 8:00 am - 8:30 am)
Colleyville Heritage High School
5401 Heritage Avenue, Colleyville, Texas - 76034, West of Highway 121 - Between Glade Road and Hall Johnson Road - map on the registration form.


Click here to download the registration form.

If you have any questions about our workshops, please contact us.


Introduction to CINDI and C/NOFS

1. What is CINDI? ( English version / Spanish version )

2. CINDI fact sheet

3. Cindi in Space Our 24-page really cool comic book about the CINDI mission and the science behind it. (Available in both English and Spanish versions.)

Exploring Earth's atmosphere and the edge of space

4. Activity: How High is Space?
Teacher Guide
Student instructions
Layers of atmosphere information
Atmosphere Information Sheet
Model pictures

5. Atmosphere Information Sheet

Satellites and scale in the Earth-Moon system

6. Activity: Where Would CINDI Be?
Supporting slides combining Activities #4 and #6

Space Weather

7. Demo: The Bubbler and Radio Scintillation

8. Magnetosphere Information Sheet

9. Sun-Earth Connection Resources (links to other educational and data sites for SOHO, Space Enivornment Center, GEMS Guide, GEM Living With a Star material, etc.)

Rockets

10. Activity: Paper Rockets

11. Activity: Industrial Strength Rocket Launcher (advanced students or for teachers)

12. Rocket Information Sheet ( English version / Spanish version )

13. Pegasus Rocket Information Sheet ( English version / Spanish version )

14. Video of a Pegasus launch back in 2003

Presentation

15. Our presentation to high school physics teachers at the CAST 2008 (November 2008) science educators conference. You can download a Google Earth presentation of some CINDI data, a document explaining the Google Earth file, a video showing the Google Earth CINDI data (80 megs), a video of radar imagery of ionospheric plasma bubbles, and our PowerPoint presentation (which requires the two videos above). Alternatively you can download this zipped folder that contains all the files listed above.


Back to the CINDI main page.


This work is supported in part by NASA as part of the CINDI mission in the Small Explorer program.