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Description area
Dates of existence
History
The University of Calgary involvement in solar-terrestrial physics began with cosmic ray studies in the International Geophysical Year (1957-1958) period, which predated the space era. The graduate program in Physics was initially developed using the facilities of the Sulphur Mountain Cosmic Ray Laboratories. Continuous monitoring of cosmic ray intensity was carried out at Sulphur Mountain from 1957 to 1978 and at the University of Calgary campus since 1964. Rocket and balloon borne measurements of cosmic rays were implemented during the sixties and early seventies.
University of Calgary physicists under the leadership of Dr. C.D. Anger pioneered the development of auroral imaging from space in 1971 with a novel instrument, called the Auroral Scanning Photometer (ASP), that flew on the Canadian ISIS 2 satelliete. As part of the Alouette/ISIS satellite program it helped solidify Canada's reputation in space research and the University of Calgary as a leader within Canada. A variety of ground-based instruments were subsequently developed, leading to the first use of imagers based on the new CCD area detector technology in satellite space research. In 1986 this technology was employed in an ultraviolet-sensitive imager flown on the Swedish Viking satellite. Its scientific success has been enormous, and it helped provide the impetus and justification for the formation of the Institute for Space Research (ISR) that was formally recognized in 1989 by the University of Calgary. This in turn helped attract the funding for the Canadian Network for Space Research (CNSR), 1990-1995, a 7 million element of the original Networks of Centres of Excellence program.
The ISR has expanded recently from a concentration on optical instrumentation flown on international satellites to the inclusion of plasma instrumentation flown on a variety of platforms from sounding rockets to interplanetary probes. The emphasis of the ISR is on experimental observations to address both basic and applied resarch questions. The observations are carried out largely by placing Canadian built instrumentation on international satellites, developiong Canadian, and international rocket payloads, and also using a variety of ground based measurement techniques