The South Dakota Space Grant Consortium (SDSGC) conducts programs in six main areas. The Consortium’s activities in these areas during the past year are summarized below.

 1.    Research Infrastructure

As a "capability enhancement" state in NASA’s Space Grant College and Fellowship Program, development of research infrastructure within South Dakota is a primary focus of SDSGC activities. Highlights in research areas over the past year include:

• Support for South Dakota’s recent NASA EPSCoR Preparation Grant that is focused on the use of remote sensing and GIS in coordination with surface-based observational techniques for long-term ecological and climate monitoring of Prairie Pothole wetland sites. Research Theme Teams consisting of numerous SDSGC members and affiliates have been developed for this project in the areas of Agriculture/Biogeochemistry, Atmospheric Science/Climate, Ecosystem Stability/Dynamics, Hydrology, Remote Sensing/GIS, and Social Dimensions. Collaboration with relevant NASA scientists has occurred and will continue. Administrative support for several of the Theme Team members to travel to NASA Centers and NASA-related conferences and workshops has been provided through the SD Space Grant. SDSM&T recently created and maintains a website for SD's NASA EPSCoR Preparation Grant Project located at nasaepscor/

• Support for the recent charter meeting of the Western Research Alliance (WRA). The objective of this broad based organization is to provide a regional forum for academic researchers, entrepreneurs, state and federal agencies, and local economic developers who are interested in the promotion of research, technology transfer, and business development. Although WRA meetings will be held in Rapid City, SD, participants in this research organization encompass the tri-state region of western South Dakota, eastern Montana, and northeastern Wyoming.

• Technical and financial support for GIS-remote sensing and image processing laboratories at member universities and educational affiliates (including Native American Tribal Colleges). This support is for research and educational projects involving precision agriculture, algorithm development for NDVI data, plant science, climate change, and land surface processes. These projects all involve interaction with the USGS EROS Data Center (EDC) located in South Dakota. Support has also been provided for submittal of proposals to NSF, NASA, DOA, NOAA and EPA for further development of these facilities.

• Specific remote sensing-precision agriculture projects at South Dakota State University (SDSU):

1. Submission of a successful Science Data Buy proposal to Stennis Space Center for an October overflight in eastern South Dakota. The aim of this ongoing, interdisciplinary research is to learn how detailed, repetitive aerial multi-spectral remote sensing data can be used for monitoring field sites and developing decision models. The long-term ecological monitoring site proposed for the Prairie Potholes through the developing NASA EPSCoR project will require characterization by such remote sensing data collection and analysis.
   
2. Support for the remote sensing portion of a research proposal prepared in collaboration with animal and veterinary scientists in which AVHRR-derived greenness will be examined in relation to a particular parasite in beef cattle on the rangelands of western South Dakota.

• Continuation of activities on a multidisciplinary project at Augustana College that includes paleolimnology, image processing, and analysis of remote sensing images. This project seeks to extend preliminary fieldwork to utilize remote sensing and land use analysis to determine the impact of human activities, such as timber harvest, on a watershed.

• Interactions among Consortium members at SDSM&T and SDSU related to modifications and operation of the Air, Environmental and Water Resources (AEWR) Ph.D. program.

• Continuing support of the scientific cluster on Imaging and Modeling of Coupled Atmospheric-Surface-Subsurface Processes in South Dakota’s NSF EPSCoR program.

• Participation in the Upper Midwest Aerospace Consortium (UMAC) Public Access Resource Center (PARC) project entitled "Empowering the General Public to Use EOSDIS – Implementation Phase". Scientists from SDSGC are involved in the Precision Agriculture, Animal Health and Disease, and Educational PARC (EdPARC) components of this NASA-funded project.

• Ongoing collaborative support of remote sensing and modeling work for the Upper Missouri River Basin (UMRB) Hydrology Pilot Project funded by NASA Earth Science. The goal of this interdisciplinary project is to study links among hydrology, weather and climate using the Black Hills as a laboratory to provide an understanding that can be applied across the central region of the North American continent.

• Several scientists from the SDSGC participated in the soil moisture component of a NASA-funded project entitled "The Northern Great Plains Regional Earth Science Applications Center" (RESAC).

• Members of the SDSGC coordinated PictureTel video lectures presented by James Vogelman, Dean Gesch, and Bradley Reed of EDC. The lecture topics were "The Status of Future Satellite Systems" and "Landsat 7, LightSAR, and MODIS".

• The SDSGC provided limited funding to stimulate the publication of scientific papers and for presentations at research conferences.

2.    Higher Education

In the past year, we have had great success with our Diversity Enhancement Fellowship program. By this means we provide research and educational opportunities for faculty and students at Tribal Colleges and other Native American educational institutions in South Dakota. All six Tribal Colleges with campuses in South Dakota are now Educational Affiliates of our Consortium: Oglala Lakota College, Sinte Gleska University, Si Tanka College (formerly Cheyenne River Community College), Sitting Bull College (headquarters in Ft. Yates, ND), Sisseton-Wahpeton Community College, and Lower Brule Community College.

Recently, the SDSGC held a competition targeted on Native American institutions in SD for Program Initiation Grants (PIG). Six proposals were submitted and three were supported out of the SDSGC Diversity Enhancement funds. Funded projects were: "Life Through Water", Loneman School Corporation, Oglala, SD; "Computer Science Degree with Emphasis on GIS/RS Technologies", Si Tanka College, Eagle Butte, SD; and "Learn About the Earth: A Hands-On Environmental Earth Science Education Program", Wounded Knee District School, Manderson, SD. Arrangements were made with authors of the nonfunded proposals (Sitting Bull College, Ft. Yates, ND; Enemy Swim Day School, Waubay, SD; and Sicangu Policy Institute and Sinte Gleska University, Mission, SD) to work with other SDSGC members to enhance their proposal's competitiveness for a second PIG competition to be held in Spring 2000.

Si Tanka College's "Computer Science Degree with Emphasis on GIS/RS Technologies" PIG was funded for $10,000. This project will assist Si Tanka College (formerly Cheyenne River Community College), a Native American college in rural South Dakota, in assessing the feasibility of developing a course of study leading to a two-year degree in Computer Science with an emphasis in GIS and Remote Sensing technology. Through collaboration with SDSM&T and the SDSGC, the project will provide the resources to train Si Tanka College science and computer faculty in GIS technology as well as provide GIS fellowships to selected students. If the development of such a degree tract is found feasible, it could lead to the first one of its nature at a Native American owned and operated institution of higher learning. This would benefit not only the South Dakota Space Grant Consortium, but would also expand the breadth of degree opportunities in NASA-supported technologies at Native American schools. Si Tanka College was recently awarded $300,000 in funding through The College Fund/UNCF NASA Program for their "Curriculum Improvement Partnership Award Program for Minority-Serving Institutions". Combined with this already funded program, the SDSGC PIG project will enhance Si Tanka's educational improvements and will serve as a regional model for increasing the number of Native American students who are exposed to NASA-related science and engineering.

Dr. MaryJo Lee, SDSGC Diversity Coordinator, was an active participant in the 2+2+2 program on the SDSU campus. The goal of the 2+2+2 program is to improve Native American recruitment and retention at SDSU.

A SDSM&T graduate student, Angie Monheim, was selected for the Student Internship Program at Goddard Space Flight Center. While at Goddard this summer, Ms. Monheim worked on a Modular Wideband Active Vibration Absorber project with Dr. S. Wahid Zewari.

In the past year, we focused the efforts of the South Dakota Student Research Balloon Project on the launching of free and tethered balloon systems for generating weather, climate and hydrology data. These balloon-based measurements were conducted during the Intensive Observation Period (IOP) of the NASA-funded UMRB hydrology project. In addition to their potential use in research projects, these systems have found great utility in our Outreach programs.

Our SDSGC-funded students are also involved with the precision agriculture, climate change, environmental science, algorithm development, paleolimnology, and land surface processes research at the GIS-Remote Sensing and Image Processing Laboratories at SDSGC institutions.

In August of this year, SDSM&T compiled a team of students, faculty, and press representation for NASA's KC-135A Reduced Gravity Student Flight Opportunity competition and subsequently submitted a proposal in November. If funded, an experiment to test the deployment of thin membranes in zero-g will be conducted in the March 2000 KC-135A flight. Partial support for this pending KC-135A project will be provided by the SDSGC FY-2000 budget.

GRADUATE and UNDERGRADUATE STUDENT ASSISTANTSHIPS and LABOR

• SDSU - Mariah Tenamoc and Charles Cole
• SDSM&T - Angie Monheim, Lisa Teeslink, Teresa Corbin, and Pat Kozak
• Augustana - Chris Burke, Kyle Hanson, Ken Solberg, Catherine Van Note, Muna Ashraf, Seth Norris, Rolf Nyhus, Joey Gleason, Barry Hess, Cullen Robbins, and Val Olness

FACULTY and STAFF TRAVEL SUPPORT

SDSU

Dr. Oguz Kucur, EE Dept
IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference, Houston, Texas (May 17-18, 1999)
Presented paper "Performance of Scale-Code Division Multiple Access (SCDMA) Over the Asynchronous AWGN Channel"

Dr. Sung Y. Shin, Computer Science
International ISCA CATA-99 Conference, Cancun, Mexico (April 6-9, 1999)
Presented papers "Real-Time Email ‘Talk’ Under Windows NT" and "Heuristic Rules for Data Warehouse Developments"

Dr Shin is currently working at NASA Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston for the Fall of 1999. He is developing a fully functional software system, CEVP (Countermeasures Evaluation and Validation Project) for the Division of Space Life Sciences in NASA JSC. The proposed CEVP Database is intended to interface with the International Space Station (ISS) and Mission Control Center data collection, distribution and archival protocols for medical and operational data.

Robert Finch, EE Dept
Data Compression Conference and Workshop (March, 1999)

Mary O’Neill, ERC
1999 Annual National Association of Research in Science Teaching Conference, Boston (March 28-31, 1999)
Present paper "Prairie to Mountain Explorer: GIS and Remote Sensing Datasets for the Classroom"

SDSM&T

Dr. Sherry Farwell, SDSGC Director
National Council of Space Grant Directors Meeting, Wash. D.C. (March 10-13,1999)

Tom Durkin, SDSGC Deputy Director & Outreach Coordinator
National Space Grant Directors Meeting, Honolulu, HI (October 22-25, 1999)

Several meetings and trips were supported by Space Grant to allow Sherry Farwell and the former Outreach Coordinators Linda Allen and Annmarie Merager to travel to SDSGC meetings, Native American schools, Space Day activities, etc.

Augustana

Dr. Daniel Swets, Craig Spencer, Reynold Nesiba, and others were supported by Space Grant for travel and research.

 

3.    K-12 Outreach

The Consortium now employs a full-time Deputy Director/Outreach Coordinator at our lead institution (SDSM&T) and part time Outreach Coordinators at SDSU, Augustana and EDC to develop and coordinate K-12 programs. Highlights from the past year include:

• Three students from Hill City Elementary School in South Dakota (Robert Bennett, Mike Roggenthen, and Jake Stratemeyer) won two first place awards in the National Student Involvement Program (NSIP). The contests these students won were "Design a Mission to Mars" and "Watching Earth Change". The awards were presented in a ceremony this spring by the former SDSGC Outreach Coordinator Annmarie Merager.

• The fifth annual South Dakota Space Day at Black Hills State University in Spearfish was attended by approximately 3,000 students, parents, teachers, and other interested members of the region. The overall theme to this year’s Space Day was "NASA and the Environment: Where Earth and Space Meet". A NASA astronaut, Roger Zwieg, was the keynote speaker. Mr. Zwieg is a South Dakota native, as was Sam Gemar, the astronaut who appeared at the previous year’s Space Day. Sponsorship for this year’s Space Day was provided by Black Hills Fibercom.

• Ongoing support and development of the South Dakota Weather Station Network (SDWSN). Five middle schools in western South Dakota have been operating weather stations supplied by SDSGC for over a year now. We are in the process of attempting to negotiate an agreement with Rapid City television station (KNBN) to put data from SDWSN weather stations on their web site, and include it in their weather broadcasts. Internet connection boxes have already been developed for this interactive project by Weather Computation Systems of Kansas City, MO.

• Support of the summer Scientific Knowledge for Indian Learning and Leadership (SKILL) program for Native American (NA) students in grades 4-8, and the summer SKILL honors program for NA students in grades 9-12. These SKILL programs are partially funded by NASA. We also provided support to the American Indian Science and Engineering Society (AISES).

• Continuing presentation of Aerospace in the Curriculum summer teacher workshops in Sioux Falls and Rapid City. The workshops were led by Bill Daley of Hernandez Engineering, who presented material on the theme of "Geography from Space".

• Supported travel to South Dakota and Nebraska reservations for Dr. MaryJo Lee and SDSU journalism students to compile information on Native Americans in science, math, engineering and technology. This information will soon be published in a special newspaper that will focus on projects of interest to the Native American communities in SD.

• Loneman School Corporation's "So There Will Be Life Through Water" PIG was funded by the SDSGC for $10,000. This project will allow a Native American elementary and junior high school on the Pine Ridge Reservation in rural South Dakota to create an interactive "hands-on" learning process focusing on Earth Systems Science.

• Wounded Knee District School's "Learn About the Earth: A Hands-On Environmental Earth Science Education Program" PIG was funded by the SDSGC for $10,000. This project will allow the Wounded Knee District School, a Native American school for grades K-8 in rural South Dakota, to develop and implement a hands-on environmental Earth science and education program designed to enhance the environmental awareness of participants and assist students to attain higher levels of achievement in mathematics and Earth science.

• Teaching SMART, a SDSGC Educational Affiliate, was featured on CBS News on March 14.

• The SDSGC, along with the NSF Rural Systemic Initiative, coordinated and supported a Tribal Leadership Conference at Black Hills State University. Pam Christol, a NASA/AESP specialist, joined SDSGC members Tom Durkin and Larry Hines as participants in this conference.

• Ongoing cooperative agreement with the Nebraska SGC for Native American and Tribal College outreach efforts. A teleconference was held in May involving Nebraska and South Dakota SGC personnel to discuss plans for additional interactive efforts.

• Production and distribution of the Consortium's newsletter "Reaching Out". This newsletter is also now posted on the SDSGC web site.

• Presentation of Exploring Space Science Day and the summer Aviation Career Education Academy (ACE Camp), and support of Opening Doors in the Community and the summer Governor’s Camp.

• Sent a SDSGC representative to meet with Richard Shope and other Jet Propulsion Laboratory outreach personnel, who were presenting a program entitled "From the Outer Planets to the Inner City: Community Involvement in Space Exploration" to the Lakota community at Takini School in South Dakota.

• Participation in meetings of the Science Linkages in the Community (SLIC) Advisory Board and the Board of Teaching SMART (Science, Math, and Related Technology), a Program of Girls Inc.

• Coordination with the South Dakota Science Teachers Association, the South Dakota Teachers of Mathematics Association, the Society of Women Engineers, and other organizations in supporting various presentations by visiting scientists to K-12 classes in SD.

• Initiated discussions to incorporate SDSGC educational units at the new Children's Science Center that is scheduled to open in Rapid City in Spring 2000.

• In November 1999, SDSM&T will send 6 American Indian Science & Engineering Society (AISES) members (including SDSM&T and OLC/MIE students) to the conference- Bob Whipple, Connie Giroux, JR High Elk, Tony Fischer, Amy Flying By and Robert Wagers to the AISES 21st Annual National Conference in Minneapolis.

• The SDSGC provided partial financial sponsorship for the ACE CAMP held on July 11-15, 1999 in which 16 students (12 male, 4 female) participated. Members of the SDSGC also participated in a Recruiting Fair (ACE Camp coordinator and volunteers manned a display and distributed materials on ACE Camp) with the SDSU Department of Education and Business Aviation, Sioux Falls to promote SDSU’s new cooperative program in aviation education.

4.    Other Public Service

This service area included press releases and various informational presentations about aerospace programs and activities to groups such as local Science Day fairs, the Civil Air Patrol, Chambers of Commerce, Girl and Boy Scouts, Youth and Family Services, and the South Dakota Air and Space Museum.

The Consortium continues to sponsor the Star Date program produced by the McDonald Observatory, University of Texas at Austin, on public radio in the state.

5.    Fellowships and Scholarships

The SDSGC sponsored two Summer Faculty Fellowships that were tenable at EDC. These fellowships enhance the coordination of research activities among Consortium members and strengthen the research infrastructure component by building up the state’s capabilities in remote sensing. Dr. Maribeth Price from SDSM&T studied Monitoring and Modeling of Prairie Potholes at EDC this summer. The faculty-selected member from SDSU was Dr. Madeleine Andrawis.

SDSGC also supported a number of graduate and undergraduate students through fellowships, scholarships, and assistantships. We have established a Diversity Enhancement Fellowship program to provide research and educational opportunities for faculty and students at Tribal Colleges and other Native American institutions in South Dakota. The total amount of Consortium support for faculty and students through these avenues exceeded $50,000 over the project year.

6.    Administration

SDSGC members conducted four face-to-face meetings and two teleconference meetings/seminars during the past project year. These meetings allowed for interactive discussion of the issues and direction of the Consortium. We continued to focus on competitive allotment of SDSGC funds and the goal of nurturing projects that can attract external support.

In order to better coordinate our various efforts, SDSGC established a new, full-time position of Deputy Director and Outreach Coordinator at SDSM&T. This position has been ably filled by Mr. Tom Durkin.