Kasha Patel, NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center

Robert Alexander spends parts of his day listening to a soft white noise, similar to water falling on the outside of a house during a rainstorm. Every once in a while, he hears an anomalous sound and marks the corresponding time in the audio file. Alexander is listening to the suns magnetic field and marking potential areas of interest. After only ten minutes, he has listened to one months worth of data.

Alexander is a PhD candidate in design science at the University of Michigan. He is a sonification specialist who trains heliophysicists at NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, to pick out subtle differences by listening to satellite data instead of looking at it.

Sonification is the process of displaying any type of data or measurement as sound, such as the beep from a heart rate monitor measuring a persons pulse, a door bell ringing every time a person enters a room, or, in this case, explosions indicating large events occurring on the sun. In certain cases, scientists can use their ears instead of their eyes to process data more rapidly and to detect more details than through visual analysis. A paper on the effectiveness of sonification in analyzing data from NASA satellites was published in the July issue of Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics.

NASA produces a vast amount of data from its satellites. Exploring such large quantities of data can be difficult, said Alexander. Sonification offers a promising supplement to standard visual analysis techniques.

LISTENING TO SPACE

Alexanders focus is on improving and quantifying the success of these techniques. The team created audio clips from the data and shared them with researchers. While the original data from the Wind satellite was not in audio file format, the satellite records electromagnetic fluctuations that can be converted directly to audio samples. Alexander and his team used custom written computer algorithms to convert those electromagnetic frequencies into sound. Listen to the following multimedia clips to hear the sounds of space.

PROCESSING AN OVERWHELMING AMOUNT OF DATA

Alexanders focus is on using clips like these to quantify and improve sonification techniques in order to speed up access to the incredible amounts of data provided by space satellites. For example, he works with space scientist Robert Wicks at NASA Goddard to analyze the high-resolution observations of the sun. Wicks studies the constant stream of particles from our closest star, known as the solar wind a wind that can cause space weather effects that interfere with human technology near Earth. The team uses data from NASAs Wind satellite. Launched in 1994, Wind orbits a point in between Earth and the sun, constantly observing the temperature, density, speed and the magnetic field of the solar wind as it rushes past.

Wicks analyzes changes in Winds magnetic field data. Such data not only carries information about the solar wind, but understanding such changes better might help give a forewarning of problematic space weather that can affect satellites near Earth. The Wind satellite also provides an abundance of magnetometer data points, as the satellite measures the magnetic field 11 times per second. Such incredible amounts of information are beneficial but only if all the data can be analyzed.

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More Than Meets The Eye: NASA Scientists Listen To Data