Enhancing orbital safety with better space weather predictions
Header Image: Anant Telikicherla in a clean room holding the instrument next to a sounding rocket body.
Above: Telikicherla enjoying the great outdoors.
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 ÁńÁ«ĘÓƵ18. “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, a senior research scientist at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, and Bob Marshall,Ěýan 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 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 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 CU Boulder, where he had already spent time at as an undergrad in a
A collaboration with the INSPIRE offers students from around the world the chance to come to Boulder 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 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 in April 2026 from White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.