Research

Faster, cleaner, better: revolutionary water treatment

Jeff Zehnder — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 19:15:28 +0000

Faster, cleaner, better: revolutionary water treatment Jeff Zehnder Thu, 07/17/2025 - 13:15

Jeff Zehnder

Anthony Straub (r) with PhD student Kian Lopez in a lab.

Anthony Straub is making revolutionary advances in water purification for life on Earth and in space.

Using nanoscale membranes—thinner than 1/100th the width of a human hair—Straub has developed a technology that could significantly improve conventional water treatment, microchip production, and desalination.

His efforts are receiving major recognition from the National Science Foundation, which is honoring Straub with a CAREER Award, a five-year, $550,000 grant to advance his research.

“We’re excited about this work,” said Straub, an assistant professor in the Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering at the ɫ��ֱ��. “For desalination, switching to these membranes could produce 50 times cleaner water while lasting much longer. It’s really a big deal.”

Membrane technology has been in use for water purification for over five decades. It works well for many applications, but filter degradation is a problem, and even at peak conditions, some contaminants can still pass through the membranes.

“Current membranes are very hard to clean,” Straub said. “A major advance of this new membrane is you can expose it to concentrated bleach and cleaning chemicals. It also removes almost every impurity from water – salts, dissolved metals, and organic contaminants like hormones, PFAS, and pharmaceuticals.”

In the new process, Straub traps a tiny layer of air inside a porous membrane. Using pressure, water is forced against the membrane until it evaporates and recondenses on the other side of the air layer. The technology requires no additional electricity or heat and operates with pumps already used in water systems.

“It’s reimagining distillation. Thermal distillation – essentially boiling water – has been used to purify water for centuries, but it is really energy intensive. We’re laying the groundwork for distillation with pressure as the driving force, and it is 10 times more energy efficient,” Straub said.

The technology has advanced beyond the initial research phase. Straub has conducted successful small-scale tests and has two provisional patents on the design. Last year, he co-founded a spinoff company and received a grant from NASA for a prototype purification system for astronauts to use on a future Moon base.

Design of ultrathin air-trapping membranes for pressure-driven vapor transport. For more details, read "Pressure-driven distillation using air-trapping membranes for fast and selective water purification" in the journal Science Advances.

“There were papers discussing this process; the theoretical foundations were there. Our major advance was demonstrating it successfully. We had to understand how to develop materials with really small pore sizes that can trap air,” Straub said.

A major focus of the future work will be better analysis and modeling of the process.

“This technology is transitioning to applied use, but some aspects of the process aren’t as well understood. That’s very important for end users, to know how this design works, how the transport happens. We have some models, but they’re for very idealized systems, which isn’t how things work in the real world,” he said.

Beyond traditional water treatment, the process has drawn significant interest from microchip producers. Semiconductor wafers are manufactured in clean rooms, and ultrapure water is needed to rinse wafers and wash away residue produced during chip etching.

Even the tiniest water impurities can damage the chips, so water must be purified to levels far beyond what is needed for regular drinking water, requiring an expensive, elaborate system. Straub’s technology would dramatically simplify the process and lower costs.

“This is a huge potential market. Companies currently use a treatment process involving at least 14 different steps, and they avoid shutting down the machines because they’re worried that particles could enter the production line,” he said.

In addition to advancing research, Straub is also developing an education and outreach component as part of the CAREER award. Collaborating with a faculty colleague in the mechanical engineering department, Daniel Knight, the pair are developing a project-based water treatment course that will be used in rural K-12 schools across Colorado.

“Lots of these schools are in areas where they don’t have enough water, so this is really important,” Straub said.

He hopes the outreach will be both educational and promote career opportunities for the next generation of water engineers.

“My parents grew up in Latin America in underserved areas,” he said. “In undergrad, I was drawn to improve water treatment in low resource settings, and I caught the research bug. I want to encourage other people, too. It’s about making the world a better place.”

Anthony Straub is making revolutionary advances in water purification for life on Earth and in space. Using nanoscale membranes—thinner than 1/100th the width of a human hair—Straub has developed a...

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Enhancing orbital safety with better space weather predictions

Jeff Zehnder — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 18:40:25 +0000

Enhancing orbital safety with better space weather predictions Jeff Zehnder Fri, 07/11/2025 - 12:40

Jeff Zehnder

Anant Telikicherla is developing new instrumentation for an upcoming sub-orbital rocket flight.

Surrounded by racks of electronics equipment, tools, and pieces of an aluminum rocket body – the laboratory could be mistaken for a mad scientist’s lair – Telikicherla is working on an instrument he hopes can help provide advance warnings for solar flares.

“These flares are one of the most powerful explosions in the solar system,” said Telikicherla, a PhD student in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the ɫ��ֱ��. “Flares release an insane amount of energy that can reach Earth in eight minutes and large eruptive flares are often associated with energetic particle events that are a radiation risk to astronauts and can be really damaging to satellites.”

As a student, Telikicherla is co-advised by two leading researchers, Tom Woods, a senior research scientist at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, and Bob Marshall, an associate professor in aerospace.

Flare prediction is an active area of research around the world, and Telikicherla is hopeful the instrument he and Woods have been developing could eventually provide 10-15 minutes advance warning of flares. It is a short period of time, but any additional notice would be beneficial for space weather operations.

The basis of the instrument, called the Solar Extreme Ultraviolet Spectrograph and High Energy Imager (SEUSHI), derives from a paper Telikicherla published on solar flare onsets in The Astrophysical Journal. SEUSHI is slated to fly next spring aboard a sounding rocket.

Sounding rockets are sub-orbital flights that soar to the edge of space and offer engineers and scientists an opportunity to conduct short duration experiments for a much lower cost than those on full size rockets.

“Our group tries to build new instruments to better understand the sun, and hopefully this flight demonstrates the technology and then we’ll propose it as a long-term project aboard a future small satellite,” Telikicherla said.

A native of Dehli in India, Telikicherla has been fascinated by space since a young age. He earned his bachelor’s at the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology, a university run by India’s national space agency, and then worked at the Indian Space Research Organization’s Human Spaceflight Center for two years.

The desire for advanced research drew him back to school.

“My work was fun, but I had a longing to do more fundamental research, to go beyond what a normal industry job does,” he said.

He earned a master’s at the University of Alberta. There, he worked on a different sounding rocket instrument and earned first prize at the AIAA SmallSat conference student paper competition for a submission based on his master’s thesis.

Telikicherla wearing a clean room "bunny suit."

For his PhD, Telikicherla was drawn to ɫ��ֱ��, where he had already spent time at as an undergrad in a summer exchange program called INSPIRE.

A collaboration with the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP), INSPIRE offers students from around the world the chance to come to ɫ��ֱ�� to design and build a small satellite. It was where he was first introduced to Woods’ research.

“He was the PI on one of the satellite’s instruments and as we were building it, I realized I was more interested in the instrument than the larger spacecraft. That sounded more exciting, making new measurements of things no one has ever looked at before,” Telikicherla said “I told him I wanted to analyze the solar data after it launched and he said absolutely, even though I didn’t have a solar physics background.”

Now a year into his PhD program, Telikicherla splits his time on campus between the lab and conducting observational analysis of existing solar flare data.

“I can download data in real-time from satellites using LASP’s downlink and that’s awesome,” Telikicherla said. “Then, let’s say I get bored staring at my computer for hours, I can go work in the lab instead. I get to do both, and I feel that’s very enjoyable from a PhD student life point of view.”

SEUSHI is scheduled to launch aboard LASP’s EVE Rocket Program in April 2026 from White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.

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Robots could one day crawl on the moon. These undergrads are laying the groundwork

Jeff Zehnder — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 18:38:40 +0000

Robots could one day crawl on the moon. These undergrads are laying the groundwork Jeff Zehnder Fri, 07/11/2025 - 12:38

The future of moon exploration may be rolling around a non-descript office on the ɫ��ֱ�� campus.

Here, a robot about as wide as a large pizza scoots forward on three wheels. It uses an arm with a claw at one end to pick up a plastic block from the floor, then set it back down.

To be sure, this windowless office, complete with gray carpeting, is nothing like the moon. And the robot, nicknamed “Armstrong,” wouldn’t last a minute on its frigid surface.

But the scene represents a new vision for space exploration—one in which fleets of robots working in tandem with people crawl across the lunar landscape, building scientific observatories or even human habitats.

Xavier O’Keefe operates the robot from a room down the hall. He wears virtual reality goggles that allow him to see through a camera mounted on top of Armstrong.

“It’s impressively immersive,” said O’Keefe, who earned his bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering sciences from ɫ��ֱ�� this spring. “The first couple of times I used the VR, the robot was sitting in the corner, and it was really weird to see myself using it.”

He’s part of a team of current and former undergraduate students tackling a tricky question: How can humans on Earth get the training they need to operate robots on the hazardous terrain of the lunar surface? On the moon, gravity is only about one-sixth as strong as it is on our planet. The landscape is pockmarked with craters, some cast in permanent darkness.

In a new study, O’Keefe and fellow ɫ��ֱ�� alumni Katy McCutchan and Alexis Muniz report that “digital twins,” or hyper-realistic virtual reality environments, could provide a useful proxy for the moon—giving people a chance to get the hang of driving robots without risking damage to multi-million-dollar equipment.

The study is funded by NASA and the Colorado company Lunar Outpost. It is part of a larger research effort led by Jack Burns, astrophysics professor emeritus in the Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences (APS) and the Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy (CASA).

The Armstrong robot, top, and its digital twin, bottom. (Credit: Network for Exploration and Space Science)

“There was a lot of room to make mistakes with Armstrong since it wasn’t a million-dollar piece of hardware going to space,” said McCutchan, who earned her master’s degree in aerospace engineering sciences from ɫ��ֱ�� in 2025. “It was a good sandbox to mess around in.”

Digital twin

For Burns, a co-author of the study, Armstrong and its VR digital twin represent a big leap forward, despite the robot’s humble appearance. Burns is part of a team that has received a grant from NASA to design a futuristic scientific observatory on the moon called FarView—which would be made up of a web of 100,000 antennas stretching over roughly 77 square miles of the lunar surface. Daniel Szafir of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill was also a co-author of the new study.

“Unlike the Apollo program where human astronauts did all the heavy lifting on the moon, NASA’s 21st century Artemis Program will combine astronauts and robotic rovers working in tandem,” Burns said. “Our efforts at ɫ��ֱ�� are intended to make lunar robots more efficient and recoverable from errors, so precious astronaut time on the lunar surface will be better utilized.”

The space group’s first hurdle: Creating a digital twin for Armstrong to roam around in. To do that, the researchers began by creating a digital replica of their office in a video game engine called Unity—right down to the beige walls and drab carpet.

“We had to get the digital twin as close to real thing as possible,” said O’Keefe, who’s now a master’s student in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at ɫ��ֱ��. “For example, we timed how fast the robot moved over one yard. Then we did the same test in the virtual environment and got the robot’s speed to be the same.”

Next, the team ran an experiment. In 2023 and 2024, they recruited 24 human participants to operate Armstrong while sitting in a room down the hall. Donning VR goggles, the subjects took the robot through a simple task: They picked up and adjusted a plastic block that represented one of the antennas in FarView.

Half of the participants, however, got a head start. They first practiced the same task in the digital version of the office.

Humans who got the chance to operate Armstrong’s digital twin before driving the real thing completed the task roughly 28% faster than participants who only got the chance to operate the physical robot. They also reported that they felt less stress during the task.

“That’s what is really exciting about this—you’re able to simulate everything in the environment, from the shadows to the texture of the dirt, and then train operators on conditions that are as close to real as possible,” O’Keefe said. “That way, once you get to the moon, you have a higher chance of success.”

ɫ��ֱ�� researchers are working with the company Lunar Outpost to develop a digital twin of a rover on the surface of the moon. (Credit: Nico Goda/ɫ��ֱ��)

Real-world experience

McCutchan, who also joined the project as an undergrad, added that the study gave her and her fellow students a grounding in how research works in the real world.

For example, when the researchers began the experiment, they discovered that the human subjects kept making the same mistake. When they went to pick up the fake antennas with Armstrong, they often flipped the blocks over by accident. The group hadn’t anticipated that.

“Whenever you get people involved, they do things in ways you wouldn’t expect them to,” said McCutchan, who recently started work as a mechanical solutions test engineer at BAE Systems, an aerospace company.

Today, Burns’ team is moving onto a new goal: They’re recreating the much more complex environment of the lunar surface. The researchers are working with the Colorado-based company Lunar Outpost to build a digital twin of a rover on the moon in the same game engine. The hardest part, O’Keefe said, is getting the lunar dust just right.

“The rover will kick up dust with its wheels as it drives, and that could possibly block sensors or cameras,” O’Keefe said. “But it’s really hard to know exactly how dust moves on the moon because you can’t just go outside and measure it.”

For now, he is happy being a part of the future of lunar exploration, albeit from the safety of campus.

“It’s awesome to be part of this, even if it is a small part of getting people on the moon.”

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Computer science PhD student is making waves in research and the open water

Alexander James Servantez — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 16:27:34 +0000

Computer science PhD student is making waves in research and the open water Alexander Jame… Wed, 07/09/2025 - 10:27

Corey Murphey is working to understand the spread of pathogens through these aerosols and limit the transmission of airborne, infectious diseases. But she's also an accomplished marathon open-water swimmer who recently took first place in the SCAR Swim Challenge.

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Scientists develop method to build tiny custom microrobots

Susan Glairon — Tue, 08 Jul 2025 14:20:11 +0000

Scientists develop method to build tiny custom microrobots Susan Glairon Tue, 07/08/2025 - 08:20

The tiny particles could potentially help enhance drug distribution in human organs, improving the drug’s overall effectiveness or aid in removing pollutants from contaminated environments.

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Symposium advances structural engineering toward zero carbon

Susan Glairon — Mon, 07 Jul 2025 22:35:25 +0000

Symposium advances structural engineering toward zero carbon Susan Glairon Mon, 07/07/2025 - 16:35

Susan Glairon

The event, which drew 166 participants to ɫ��ֱ��’s campus, marked an industry-wide step toward cutting emissions tied to building materials like steel and concrete.

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Andras Gyenis receives CAREER award to develop next-generation quantum processors

Charles Ferrer — Wed, 25 Jun 2025 16:30:02 +0000

Andras Gyenis receives CAREER award to develop next-generation quantum processors Charles Ferrer Wed, 06/25/2025 - 10:30

Andras Gyenis, assistant professor of electrical engineering, has earned a CAREER award through the National Science Foundation to design and build more robust superconducting qubits that could push the boundaries of quantum hardware.

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Wildfires threaten water quality for years after they burn

Susan Glairon — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 16:21:26 +0000

Wildfires threaten water quality for years after they burn Susan Glairon Mon, 06/23/2025 - 10:21

A new study published today in Nature Communications Earth & Environment is the first large-scale assessment of post-wildfire water quality. Ben Livneh, associate professor in civil, environmental and architectural engineering, was the principal investigator and co-author of the study.

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Mortenson Center innovations delivering clean water to more than five million worldwide

Susan Glairon — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 23:00:23 +0000

Mortenson Center innovations delivering clean water to more than five million worldwide Susan Glairon Fri, 06/20/2025 - 17:00

ɫ��ֱ��'s Mortenson Center in Global Engineering & Resilience is transforming global water access by treating clean water as a long-term service—not just a one-time infrastructure project.

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Chasing hail: Researchers fly drones into storms as part of largest US hail study in 40 years

Jeff Zehnder — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 15:53:12 +0000

Chasing hail: Researchers fly drones into storms as part of largest US hail study in 40 years Jeff Zehnder Tue, 06/17/2025 - 09:53

Gray clouds swirl above a dusty highway in eastern Colorado between the towns of Akron and Atwood—what’s left of a thunderstorm that rolled through this stretch of prairie and rangeland just minutes before.

Wind whistles through patches of stubbly grass nearby. Then a hiss and a pop break the silence. A group of researchers release a blast of compressed air to fling a flying drone from a metal scaffold, or “catapult,” sitting on top of a white SUV. The uncrewed aircraft system (UAS) measures more than 6 feet from wingtip to wingtip. It catches the wind, and its rear propeller buzzes to life, lifting the plane dozens of feet into the air in a matter of seconds.

Céu Gómez-Faulk makes adjustments to the RAAVEN drone. (Credit: Patrick Campbell/ɫ��ֱ��)

The IRISS team rides out an oncoming storm near Wichita, Kansas. (Patrick Campbell/ɫ��ֱ��)

The chase is on.

Aerospace engineering sciences Professor Brian Argrow and his team at the ɫ��ֱ�� have joined a research project called the In-situ Collaborative Experiment for the Collection of Hail In the Plains, or ICECHIP. For six weeks this summer, scientists from 15 U.S. research institutions and three overseas are criss-crossing the country from Colorado east to Iowa and from Texas to North Dakota.

They’re searching for summer thunderstorms.

The group is exploring the conditions that give rise to hail in this part of the country—peaking in the summer and causing billions of dollars of damage every year. In the United States, hail is most common in Colorado, Nebraska, Wyoming and nearby regions, which are sometimes dubbed “hail alley.” Today, ice the size of grapes and even bigger litter the side of Colorado’s State Highway 63.

The campaign is led by Rebecca Adams-Selin at the company Atmospheric and Environmental Research and is funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation. It’s the largest effort to study hail in the United States in 40 years.

The researchers hope to understand not just how ice forms miles above the ground, but also how homeowners and builders can protect their properties from dangerous weather. They’ll do that by using radar to peer inside hailstorms. They’ll collect and freeze hailstones, and they’ll crush hail in vice-like devices to see how strong it is. Argrow’s team is usings its drone to map the swaths of hail that storms leave behind them in their wake.

“It is about saving lives and saving property,” said Argrow, professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences and director of the Integrated Remote and In-Situ Sensing (IRISS) research center at ɫ��ֱ��. “We’re working with meteorologists and atmospheric scientists trying to increase warning times to give people a chance to get to safety and work with engineers and insurance companies to build better infrastructure to withstand these onslaughts.”

His team pilots the plane, known as the RAAVEN, short for Robust Autonomous Airborne Vehicle - Endurant and Nimble, north toward the rear flank of the thunderstorm. Then, they jump into two SUVs and follow the drone as it flies as low as 120 feet above them. A camera in the plane’s belly captures the ice trailing behind the storm. From that vantage point, the landscape, normally brown dotted with green, now also has pearly white patches for hundreds of yards in either direction.

For Céu Gómez-Faulk, who’s piloting the drone today, the sight is a testament to thunderstorms.

“It’s awe-inspiring in a very serious sort of way,” said Gómez-Faulk, a graduate student in aerospace engineering sciences.

Credit: College of Engineering and Applied Science

Dark skies

Five days earlier, Argrow and his team from ɫ��ֱ�� join the ICECHIP armada at a Phillips 66 gas station in Greensburg, Kansas. The crew includes three graduate students, two IRISS employees and Eric Frew, professor of aerospace engineering sciences. They’re marking the first day of the project’s field season, or what the researchers call Intensive Observation Period 1 (IOP 1).

Judging by the conditions, the team should have plenty to study today. Weathervanes sitting on top of vans whip in circles as gusts blow a misty rain through Greensburg, a town in south central Kansas that is home to just over 700 people.

What makes hail

When conditions are right in states like Kansas and Colorado, winds blowing over the prairie can start to lift upward, forming a powerful column of rising air. These updrafts can push clouds from the lowest layer of the atmosphere, the troposphere, up to the colder stratosphere, which begins miles above Earth’s surface.

Within those towering, cauliflower-like clouds, tiny drops of water may freeze, then bounce around in the air—a sort of atmospheric game of Plinko.

That’s how hail is born.

“It starts with what we call a hail embryo, or ice,” said Katja Friedrich, professor in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at ɫ��ֱ��. “It goes through the cloud, and it accumulates supercooled liquid, which is liquid that is below freezing. The embryos accumulate more and more until they fall.”

But there’s still a lot that scientists don’t know about what happens inside the clouds.

To help find out, Friedrich is participating in the ICECHIP campaign through an effort that’s separate from Argrow’s team and its drone. Over the summer, two researchers in her lab, Jack Whiting and Brady Herron, are traveling with the armada in a red pickup truck. They’re using a device called a microwave radiometer to collect measurements of the air that rushes into hailstorms from outside—exploring how environmental conditions can feed a storm to keep it churning, or even cause it to die off.

“It’s my dream to be doing this, to be in the field studying severe weather,” said Whiting, who graduated from ɫ��ֱ�� with a bachelor’s degree in atmospheric and oceanic sciences in spring 2025. “There’s a good chance that these events are going to become more frequent in the future because of climate change, so it’s really important to understand these dangerous storms.”

“This is relatively typical this time of the year, mid-May for the Great Plains. That’s when the storms really turn up and pass through,” Argrow said. “If you live in this area, you know what this means.”

In Greensburg, they definitely do.

In 2007, a tornado ripped through the heart of this community, damaging or destroying more than 1,400 homes and buildings and killing 10 people. Just hours after the ICECHIP crew departed on May 18 this spring, another tornado touched down south of Greensburg. It traveled 11 miles before dying out, and no injuries were reported.

Argrow is no stranger to the danger storms bring. He grew up in Stroud, Oklahoma, in the heart of Tornado Alley and remembers sheltering in his family’s storm cellar during severe weather warnings.

The engineer and his colleagues previously worked on a project, led by long-time collaborator. Adam Houston of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, called Targeted Observation by Radar and UAS of Supercells (TORUS). Over two seasons, the group flew RAAVEN aircraft into supercell thunderstorms, the phenomena that give rise to dangerous tornadoes.

But while storm-chasers may pay a lot of attention to those kinds of weather events, hail causes more damage than tornadoes every year, said Ian Giammanco. He’s the lead research meteorologist for the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety (IBHS), a non-profit organization supported by property insurance and reinsurance companies.

Since 2012, hail has caused an estimated $280 billion worth of damage in the United States, according to IBHS estimates. The largest piece of hail ever discovered was about 8 inches wide, the size of a large cantaloupe.

“Our role is to understand how we can design better building materials to withstand hail,” said Giammanco, whose team is joining the ICECHIP expedition on the road. “Whether it’s a lot of small hail, or these really big hailstones, we want to understand what that risk looks like.”

Ellington Smith, a graduate student on Argrow’s team, was an undergrad at Iowa State University in spring 2023 when hailstorms erupted around the state, flattening corn fields.

“Knowing what hail can do to farmland, its’ really important to be able to quantify the damage—figuring out why these hailstorms happen and how to better predict them,” Smith said.

Intrepid aircraft

Adams-Selin and the ICECHIP team are taking what she calls a “holistic” approach to studying those kinds of dangers.

The study armada is something to behold: At the start of the field season, the ICECHIP campaign included around 100 researchers traveling in more than 20 vehicles—including pickup trucks with mesh canopies overhead to protect them from hail damage and two Doppler on Wheels trucks. These massive vehicles carry portable, swiveling radar dishes that can peer into the heart of hailstorms.

“ICECHIP is 100% NSF funded,” Adams-Selin said. “If you want to know who is responsible for improved hail forecasts, better understanding of hail science and any of these technological advances that we are using, like mobile radar, that is all NSF funding.”

The IRISS team depends on a vehicle that is a little smaller—the RAAVEN.

It’s a tough little drone. The aircraft is based off a kit designed by the company Ritewing RC. This same design inspired a storm-chasing drone that appeared in the 2024 summer blockbuster Twisters. The body of the RAAVEN is made from the same kind of foam that’s in your car bumper. It also carries sensors for measuring wind speeds and air pressure, temperature and humidity.

If the RAAVEN is flying with the wind, it can hit speeds of 75 miles per hour or more, and the aircraft can fly for up to two hours uninterrupted.

“Radar can only tell you so much,” said Frew, who joins Argrow on the ICECHIP campaign. “To really further our understanding of the atmosphere, you have to be in it.”

For ICECHIP, the team also added a 360-degree camera that drops out of the belly of the RAAVEN after it launches.

The IRISS team’s key role on the ICECHIP campaign is to measure the swaths of hail that storms leave in their wake.

A storm builds near Greensburg, Kansas. (Credit: Patrick Campbell/ɫ��ֱ��)

The team doesn’t fly the RAAVEN directly into storms for ICECHIP. Instead, it stays safely behind the bad weather, soaring in a zig-zag pattern in the wake of hailstorms as they billow across the landscape. Using the drone’s camera in real-time, the researchers view the area below that’s covered in ice. They can then measure the width of these hail swaths, capturing how big a storm’s path of destruction can grow. Argrow likens it to “a snail that leaves a trail.”

Federal Aviation Administration rules require Argrow’s team to stay in sight of the RAAVEN at all times. To do that, the researchers get in their SUVs.

Gómez-Faulk explained that the RAAVEN is semi-autonomous. Pilots like him can control where the aircraft goes, but it’s also programed to follow a sort of digital marker the team refers to as a “carrot.”

“There’s a carrot guide point that we set off some distance from the car, usually in front of the car,” he said. “The aircraft is going to chase that guide point as we drive.”

Heart pounding

Back in Greensburg, Frew emphasizes that safety is the number one priority of the IRISS team. But he acknowledges that central Kansas at the height of storm season may be an odd place to find an aerospace engineer.

Before Frew started working on projects like TORUS and ICECHIP, he didn’t know a lot about weather. His time on these studies, however, has taught him to respect the power of storms—and what engineers can accomplish when they bring their work out of the lab and into the real, windy world.

“The first time I did it, my heart was pounding. I didn’t know what to expect,” Frew said. “In order to understand this environment, someone has to go into it and take the measurements, and that’s what we’re here for.”

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