2024 Workshop: NASA Peru Sounding Rocket Campaign Planning

NASA is soliciting proposals for sounding rocket missions to be conducted in a campaign (called ‘Cielo’ or ‘sky’ in Spanish) from the Punta Lobos rocket range near Lima, Peru. The campaign is nominally scheduled for the spring or fall of 2028. The purpose of the campaign is to investigate important, contemporary problems in equatorial aeronomy, space physics, and space weather. NASA carried out two highly successful campaigns from the Punta Lobos rocket range in 1975 and 1983. This new campaign, to be carried out at the existing rocket range, represents an opportunity to investigate outstanding, critical problems in equatorial aeronomy using state-of -the-art spacecraft and ground-based instrumentation. The site was chosen primarily due to its proximity to both the magnetic equator and the Jicamarca Radio Observatory with supporting clusters of instruments deployed in the region. Furthermore, Jicamarca is undergoing a series of upgrades that will enable it to support a number of new kinds of experiments and observations to complement the space-borne measurements.

The purpose of this workshop is to inform the community about opportunities to participate in the rocket campaign and associated ground-based research. NASA anticipates the launch of 10–14 rockets. A number of colleagues from U.S. and international institutions will be taking part directly in the rocket flights or indirectly through the deployment of complementary instrumentation. Provisions for student projects and training are anticipated to be an important of the NASA campaign. Examples of scientific research topics that may be investigated include, but are not be limited to, mesospheric waves and turbulence, the equatorial electrojet, 150-km echoes, valley-region echoes, dynamo theory and equatorial electrodynamics, the midlatitude anomaly, equatorial spread-F, and the topside ionosphere. A whitepaper describing motivations and background for the upcoming campaign is available at https://rscience.gsfc.nasa.gov/keydocs/PeruWhitePaperMarch31_2023.pdf.

This workshop represents an opportunity for potential PIs and co-I’s to learn about the research opportunities afforded by this exciting rocket/radar campaign, to informally outline research goals and methods, and to see how the various research topics and ideas might fit within the larger campaign landscape. It will also be a vehicle for learning how rocket missions can be supported by Jicamarca and other research assets in the Peruvian sector. Finally, it presents a venue for proposing and planning synergistic experimental, theoretical, and computational research projects thematically related to the campaign including student projects.