What does an orange-haired, comic book superheroine have in common with a science experiment orbiting the Earth on board a satellite?

Plenty.

Both share the name CINDI, shed light on discoveries in space science and are the creations of researchers at The University of Texas at Dallas.

CINDI comic book cover

UT Dallas researchers have produced three comic books to help middle and high school students understand space science. The newest is "Cindi in the Solar Wind."

The experiment called CINDI — the Coupled Ion Neutral Dynamics Investigation — was designed and built by a research group led by Dr. Rod Heelis, director of UT Dallas' William B. Hanson Center for Space Sciences. Launched in 2008 and currently flying on an Air Force satellite, CINDI gathers data on the dynamics of the upper atmosphere, a region called the ionosphere.

Extending from about 45 to 600 miles in altitude, the ionosphere is where a significant fraction of the atmosphere consists of electrons and charged particles called ions. In this region, radio signals can be reflected or scattered by those particles. Disturbances in the ionosphere can disrupt radio signals used for communications and navigation, such as GPS. The data CINDI gathers can help scientists predict when and where these disturbances will occur. 

Part of the NASA grant that supports the CINDI project is used for science education outreach, particularly to middle and high school students. In 2005, Dr. Marc Hairston, a research scientist at the Center for Space Sciences, and Dr. Mary Urquhart, head of the Department of Science and Mathematics Education, published a comic book — starring a character named Cindi — to help explain the science of CINDI to students.

sattalite image

This illustration depicts the CINDI mission satellite in Earth orbit. UT Dallas scientists designed and built CINDI to gather data about the upper atmosphere.

Recently, Hairston and Urquhart published the third comic in the series. Urquhart said all the issues have been well received, and teachers use the materials in their classrooms. All three comics are available to download for free. The first two issues also are available in Spanish.

“People aren’t afraid of comic books,” Hairston said. “You put a science book in front of them and they get scared. But a comic book is friendly. We’re basically trying to smuggle the science in through the comic, and we seem to do a fairly good job of it.”

The first comic in the series, “Cindi in Space,” introduces Cindi as an android spacegirl whose job is to catch, count and characterize different types of robot spacedogs. The story parallels and describes the science mission of the actual CINDI instruments, which are collecting and characterizing the types of particles in the ionosphere.

“The first comic was designed for sixth- through eighth-graders, because that’s the level at which Earth science is taught in Texas,” Hairston said. “For older students, it also has some more advanced concepts in chemistry, like charged and neutral particles.”

The comics are meant to be engaging and entertaining, but what’s most important is to get the science right.

Dr. Marc Hairston,
research scientist at the Center for Space Sciences

The group published the second issue, “Cindi in the Electric Atmosphere,” in 2010. Again featuring the heroine and her spacedogs, this comic explains how the sun’s radiation interacts with Earth’s atmosphere to create the ionosphere.

The second Cindi comic is especially helpful for teaching topics such as the electromagnetic spectrum,” Urquhart said.

In the most recent installment, “Cindi in the Solar Wind,” the orange-haired spacefarer is on vacation with her canine companions to “surf” the solar wind. The solar wind is a steady stream of plasma (high-energy charged particles and electrons) that continuously flows out from the sun in all directions.  During a cycle that lasts between 10 and 12 years, the sun is periodically very active, ejecting lots of plasma, and relatively quiet, with a minimum of activity.

In the comic, the characters are near the sun when it burps out a blob of high-speed plasma called a coronal mass ejection, and one of the dogs is swept away. The trip to retrieve her companion takes Cindi to the heliopause, the boundary of the solar system where the solar wind stops. The adventure gives Cindi a chance to educate readers about how the solar wind interacts with the magnetic fields of Earth and the other planets. 

“We based the story on a real coronal mass ejection that happened in September 2011,” Hairston said. “As we were writing this issue, we also had to update the science based on data coming back from the Voyager 1 spacecraft, which had reached the heliopause in 2012.

“The comics are meant to be engaging and entertaining, but what’s most important is to get the science right.”