About the course

This course is an outcome of the 2015 NASA Science Mission Directorate (SMD) Undergraduate Student Instrument Project (USIP) Student Flight Research Opportunity competition that encouraged U.S. universities to offer undergraduate courses or clubs that build an Earth or space science payload that could fly on a suborbital vehicle, such as a sounding rocket, balloon, aircraft, or commercial suborbital reusable launch vehicles or provide related ground based observations.

The College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, the Cullen College of Engineering, the School of Technology, and The Honors College at UH are offering a two year program for credit to design and build ground instruments or balloon borne spacecraft to study the aurora borealis, the upper atmosphere, and earth science questions using ground-based sensors or multiple payloads on hand launched balloons.

The student team will be multidisciplinary and include undergraduate students from all disciplines including engineering, science, humanities, business, art, and other fields.

Deploy Experiments in Alaska or Texas

A select number of students will be able to travel to Alaska in 2025 to launch or deploy the experiments.

In 2023 and 2024, experiments will also be conducted in Texas to study the solar eclipses that will traverse Texas on 14 October 2023 and 8 April 2024. The ground tracks of these two eclipses cross in Vanderpool, Texas. The experiments will be part of the Nationwide Eclipse Balloon Program (NEBP) which begins in January 2023.

The start of UH’s Observing Our Changing Planet (USIP VI) program has been adjusted to support NEBP. We accepted ~13 early-start students into the program in January 2023. We are now recruiting an additional ~15-20 students for Fall 2023 to round-out the USIP VI cohort for Alaska, 2025.

Need more information?

Students interested in participating should attend an information session that was be held on Wednesday, April 26, 2023, 5:30 PM in room 634 of S&R I. This meeting was recorded. See:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/119T_bDbCMKqQ-UgPPA2oA3GlKm4yIaBM/view?usp=share_link

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1LMfhFUBVKW-uaGVMSBTYFUzKMUEZL0K7/edit?usp=share_link&ouid=111835059834530656837&rtpof=true&sd=true

Additional information or questions can be obtained by sending email to one of the contacts below:

Prof. Edgar Bering, eabering@uh.edu

Prof. Shuhab Khan, sdkhan@Central.UH.EDU

Prof. Andrew Renshaw, arenshaw@Central.UH.EDU

Prof. Zheng Chen, zchen43@central.uh.edu

Student Blogs

A student blog from the 2017 and 2018 campaigns can be found at https://usip-uh.weebly.com/.

Project alumni and present students have volunteered to provide student perspective. Ask questions by email to any of the following:

Arian Ehteshami ffehteshami@yahoo.com;
Rachel Gamblin rbgamblin@live.com;
Presley Greer presleygreer@my.unt.edu;
Bryan Gunawan bryan.gunawan95@gmail.com;
Elizabeth Hernandez eli83santos@gmail.com;
Kyle Myren k.t.myren@gmail.com;
Afriaa Nasir afriaa.annani.nasir@gmail.com;
Michelle Nowling micnowling@gmail.com;
Itay Porat itaygp@gmail.com;
Jason Ruszkowski Jason.ruszkoski@gmail.com;
Nikolai Sardo nikolai.sardo@gmail.com;
Aliasghar Shariff aliasgharshariff@gmail.com;
Aaron Smith aaronbsmith2001@gmail.com;
Chloe Tovar chloetovar19@gmail.com;
Alexandra Ulinski Arulinski@uh.edu

Apply Now!

To apply to be a member of the class, please download and fill out this form http://nsmn1.uh.edu/ebering/USIP%20UH%20Application.pdf. Return it by e-mail to Prof. Edgar Bering, eabering@uh.edu by Friday, May 12, 2023.

Organization Meeting -- June 5, 2023

The organization and information meeting will be on Monday, 5 June 2023 in 634 SRI at 12 noon. You may choose between BIOL 4397, ECE 4398-01, GEOL 4398, MECE 4398-02, or PHYS 4360-01. If you need a section in another major, please ask. These classes are consent of instructor with a cap of 25 enrollees These classes are being offered for additional new students in Fall 2023.