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.
We now have the Space Science Resources CD we give out at science education conferences with all of our material available here for downloading. Simply click here to download the material. You will get a 515 MB compressed file that will expand to a 605 MB folder with all our handouts, videos, comic books, and presentations. These files include not just the CINDI material, but also UT Dallas Cosmology materials for middle and high school, the middle school Stars and Planets curriculum, Scale in the Solar System, and more.
1. What is CINDI? ( English version / Spanish version )
3. The Cindi comic book series Our really cool comic books starring Cindi the android space girl and her two spacedogs:Cindi in Space (2005) and Cindi in the Electric Atmosphere (2010). In these books Cindi explains all about the CINDI mission and the science behind it. (Available in both English and Spanish versions.) Our comic books were the subject of a feature article on the NASA website in October 2010.
4. Activity: How High is Space?
Teacher Guide
Student instructions
Layers of atmosphere information
Atmosphere Information Sheet
Model pictures
6. Activity: Where Would CINDI Be?
Supporting slides combining Activities #4 and #6
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.)
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
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.
16. Our video presenting Dr. Greg Earle (on of the Principal Investigators on the CINDI mission) explaining how our plasma instruments work and future ideas for reducing their size to fly on small "cubesats." We have the movie in a small version (only ~80 megs), or in a larger version (~300 megs).
Back to the CINDI main page.