Global cosmic-ray muon detector network
A detector in every country on Earth.
That is where this network is going. Twenty-one stations in eleven countries report today, and we are still expanding — one detector everywhere, and dense clusters in the regions where sensitivity to space and terrestrial weather runs highest.
Detectors cheap enough for a classroom, precise enough that when a solar storm passes Earth every station sees the count fall together.
Natural Earth · detector sites, Aug 2026
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THE PROBLEM
Space weather hits a hyper-connected world, and we mostly watch it from orbit.
Coronal mass ejections and solar energetic particle events disturb power grids, satellite communications and GPS. The instruments we rely on to see them coming are largely satellites — the very assets a severe storm degrades. Ground-based cosmic-ray monitoring is the resilient second layer, but conventional observatories are expensive and few, so most of the planet goes unwatched.
OUR ANSWER
Make the instrument cheap, and put it everywhere.
gLOWCOST — global LOW-COst cosmic-ray muon detector network for monitoring dynamic changes in Space and Terrestrial weather — takes detection technology from fundamental nuclear physics and rebuilds it as a few-hundred-dollar instrument: plastic scintillator, silicon photomultipliers, and an edge-computing node that returns data in near real time. Founded in 2023 at the COSMIC centre at Georgia State University.
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SCIENTIFIC MOTIVATION
Every muon count is a message from two places at once.
Cosmic rays arriving at Earth are modulated by the Sun's activity on the way in, then shatter high in the atmosphere, where the temperature and density of the air decide how many muons reach the ground. So a single continuous count responds both to what the Sun is doing and to what the stratosphere is doing — provided you have enough stations, at enough latitudes, to tell the two apart.
That is why coverage is the science. Station metadata carries the geomagnetic cutoff rigidity, because latitude on a map is not the quantity that governs what gets through.
Scintillator & SiPM detection
Edge computing & IoT
GEANT4 shower simulation
Citizen-science infrastructure
Research thrusts
Four thrusts, one instrument.
The plan
From a proven detector to a planetary instrument.
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Support the network
One gift puts a permanent station in a country that has never had one.
By partnering internationally and working through citizen science, we make this technology accessible worldwide — empowering communities, expanding coverage, and advancing our understanding of the cosmos. Contributions go into hardware, students, and keeping the data open.
