Student spectrographs to collect sun data at Montana State

Montana State University will host the third national competition for NASA’s IRIS mission, according to a release. The IRIS mission is to study the transfer of energy through the sun’s atmosphere.

Seventeen teams from Arkansas, California, Idaho, Indiana, Montana, South Carolina, New York and Washington are competing. Each team has built its own spectrograph that it will use to collect data  from the sun.

The data collected will then be used to answer scientific questions related to the sun, water quality or the scattering of light. Each member of four winning teams will receive a $3,000 scholarship and the remaining six teams will receive a solar telescope.

Image: One of the Montana State University teams in last year’s National Student Solar Spectrograph Competition analyzes data from a spectrograph of the sun. (Credit: MSU News Service)