"Wait, What?"

It is not often I get to leave people completely stunned and confused at the same time, but that is just what happened last week while I was teaching a snow science class.  I posed the following question to a group of 9th grade science students: "Imagine you have a huge amount of information you need to send from here to a computer 1,200 miles away how are you going to do it?"  We all stood next to this odd looking structure high up in the mountains as they all pondered their answers. I got some pretty logical answers; underground cable connects the two computers together, bounce the information off a satellite, or send the information using a wireless network. Ok, all good ideas I told them, but not the answer I was looking for. Then I blew their minds, "the way this data gets from one place to another is by meteor tail." A hush filled the forest and the students looked a little confused. The teacher pushed her way through the students and looked at me and said' Wait, what? Did you say meteor tails?" Yep you heard me right.

Scientists estimate 25 million pieces of space junk try to pass through the earth's atmosphere every day. When this space junk be it a part of an asteroid or piece of metal which fell of  a satellite or space craft when this junk starts moving through our atmosphere it begins to bun up creating a meteors or what we non-scientist call shooting stars.

From NASA's Website. 

 That bright tail you see behind the space junk which is burning up lasts for about 2-3 seconds and that is what two computers are using to send data to each other.  COOL!!! This is why I love science!
The big odd looking thing we were sanding next to was a SNOTEL (snow telemetry site) and it looks like this.







Every thirty minutes SNOTEL sites all across North America are sending information to computer centers with real-time data on how much snow is up in the mountains, how much new snow fell since it sent its last data set, how much rain the site gets all so scientists and city managers know how much water may be available for people to use for all sorts of things.

I did a bunch of reading of scientific papers mostly written by engineers and communication specialists, too bad I understood none of it. There was a cool graphic though on the SNOTEL website. But I and my coworker wanted to know HOW it worked. 

The very smart people who manage the SNOTEL sites were happy to help us and sent this reply to our email:
 
"You are correct in thinking the radio signals bounce off the ionized trails left behind as the meteors burn up in the atmosphere.  This happens at an altitude of approximately sixty miles.  There are literally millions of these micro-meteors every day and the trails last from a few milliseconds to a few seconds.  We operate five master receive sites to collect the data from the field sites and forward it on to us here in Portland.  The master stations are located in Idaho, Utah, Mississippi, Missouri, and Ohio.  The field sites transmit near forty megahertz and have an optimal range of a thousand miles and can speak to any and all of the masters.  The data is transmitted in the packet format and parts of the message can be received by multiple master stations and reassembled.  The master stations are sending out a continuous strobe.  Hourly the data is transferred from the logger to the transmit que of the meteorburst radio.  Once the radio has data it starts listening for a strobe from the master station and when it hears one it then sends its’ data and the master station acknowledges.  If the field site doesn’t receive the acknowledgment it will continue to try sending its’ data till it does get an acknowledgement or it times out after a set number of tries, waits fifteen minutes then tries again.  The data will remain in the radio’s transmit que till it is transmitted then it is deleted from the radio, but still remains in memory in the logger.  The logger can retain well over a year’s worth of data.   It all sounds very complicated, but works very nicely.  It is not true real time data, but rather near real time.  Some sites get their data through almost immediately while others take a little while.  Overall our average latency is roughly fifteen minutes."

Crazy right? All this data being sent and received off of meteor tails! 

Want to know more Google Meteor burst technology and you'll find some pretty cool stuff.