UNH Receives $38 Million From NASA for Sun-Earth Mission

http://www.eos.sr.unh.edu/About/News/Articles?NEWS_ID=454

DURHAM, N.H. – The University of New Hampshire has received the largest, single research award in the history of the institution – $38 million from NASA to build instruments for the space agency’s Magnetospheric MultiScale (MMS) mission. As part of an international team from 12 institutes, space scientists at UNH’s Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space (EOS) will construct instruments for MMS’ four identical solar-terrestrial probes, which will study little understood, fundamental processes in the Earth’s magnetosphere -- the magnetic shield that protects the Earth from solar and cosmic radiation.

Over the next eight years, UNH scientists, engineers, graduate and undergraduate students will help construct two Electron Drift Instruments, (EDI) for each of the four spacecraft. EDI is designed to measure electric fields and electron drifts using a controlled beam of electrons. In addition, UNH will construct the central electronic controls for all the instruments being built to measure the spectrum of electromagnetic fields around the spacecraft. This “FIELDS” instrument suite will be comprised of six sensors per spacecraft.

“The expertise of the UNH Space Science Center in space instrumentation was critical to forming our excellent international FIELDS team on MMS, which will contribute many of the new observations for this exciting mission,” says physics professor Roy Torbert, director of the EOS Space Science Center and UNH’s principal investigator for the mission.

James L. Burch of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas, is leading construction of the mission’s $140 million instrument suite. The MMS spacecraft are slated to launch aboard an 86-foot, 225,000-pound Delta II rocket in July 2013.

The mission is designed to explore the plasma processes that govern the interaction of the Earth’s magnetic field with the highly charged solar wind. Plasma is a highly ionized gas sometimes described as the “fourth state of matter.” Plasmas occupy 99 percent of the observable universe. However, only in the Earth’s magnetosphere – a multilayered, comet-shaped magnetic shield that, in its tail, extends as far as 60,000 kilometers away – are these important plasma processes readily accessible for sustained study through in situ measurements.

One of those processes is magnetic reconnection, in which magnetic fields reconfigure themselves and release energy. Reconnection, a main focus of the MMS mission, is the basic mechanism by which energy from the sun and the solar wind is transferred into the Earth’s magnetospheric system. Reconnection is widely believed to play a crucial role in space and astrophysical phenomena such as magnetospheric substorms and solar flares. It is a crucial process to understand in order to be able to predict “space weather” conditions. For example, a blast of this energy from substorms or solar flares can affect satellites, Earth-based instruments and power grids, shower astronauts and aircraft flying over the Earth’s poles with deadly radiation, and light up the sky with aurora.

“In a sense, MMS represents a culmination of the extensive work done in space science at the university,” Torbert says. “It is based on previous successful NASA and European Space Agency missions in which UNH has participated, such as the CLUSTER, SOHO, ACE, WIND, and POLAR satellites, as well as our theoretical and numerical simulation work, where the process of reconnection has been observed and simulated, but never studied as rigorously as will be done on MMS.”

Other plasma processes that MMS will study include charged particle acceleration, and turbulence in key boundary regions of the Earth’s magnetosphere. Along with magnetic reconnection, these processes control the flow of energy, mass, and momentum within and across plasma boundaries, occur throughout the universe, and are fundamental to our understanding of astrophysical and solar system plasmas.

Despite four decades of study, beginning with the early Sputnik and Explorer spacecraft, much about the operation of these processes remains unknown or poorly understood. MMS and its multiple spacecraft approach will provide a much more detailed picture of the region. Each of the four satellites, flying together as a tightly coordinated fleet through the magnetosphere, will carry identical instruments and will thus be able to gather a multi-dimensional view of these processes that have eluded previous studies.

Along with UNH, co-investigators include the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University, the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the French Center for Terrestrial and Planetary Environments, the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology, the Technical University of Braunschweig, the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and the University of Iowa.

Scientists Gather at UNH to Discuss Initial Findings From Massive 2004 Air Quality Study

DURHAM, N.H. -- Last year at this time, seacoast New Hampshire was the hub of an unprecedented atmospheric science field campaign involving hundreds of scientists from around the world. Beginning Tuesday, August 9 at the University of New Hampshire, preliminary data from the International Consortium for Atmospheric Research on Transport and Transformation (ICARTT) will be shared for the first time since the six-week-long field experiment drew to a close in mid-August 2004. “This was a really complex experiment, with so many people and so much logistical integration that it took a year for people to pull their data together,” says UNH atmospheric chemist Robert Talbot, director of AIRMAP– a joint National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/UNH program aimed at understanding climate variability and the source of persistent air pollutants in New England. AIRMAP’s four regional state-of-the-art atmospheric observatories served as the foundation for the field experiment. U.S. Senator Judd Gregg helped secure funding for the AIRMAP program and facilitated NOAA's role in ICARTT.

Adds Talbot, “This campaign was the first time we’ve been able to make a concerted effort, using airplanes, a ship, satellites, and balloons, to better understand regional air quality, intercontinental transport of polluted air masses, the role that nighttime chemistry plays, and the effects of pollutants on atmospheric cooling and warming. So, there should be some important information coming out of this meeting.”

For example, there will be insights into the possible role that sea-borne compounds called halogens, like chlorine or iodine, play in creating or destroying ground-based ozone levels.

When polluted continental air meets up with halogen-rich coastal marine air, the chemistry gets complicated and is not well understood. A better understanding is important if scientists are to calculate the global ozone budget much like they are trying to ascertain the world’s carbon budget vis-à-vis climate change and global warming.

Tropospheric ozone (as opposed to the stratospheric variety that helps protect the Earth from ultraviolet radiation) is generally considered to be a pollutant and can cause respiratory problems and damage plants. At the same time, this ozone plays a dual role in helping to cleanse the Earth’s atmosphere, and so keeping a healthy balance of the compound is important in the overall, global state of our atmosphere.

At the workshop, ICARTT scientists will also for the first time be able to compare notes on what was discovered about the effect aerosols or particulate matter have on the cooling or warming of air masses. The “radiative” properties of these particles play a critical role in regional and hemispheric temperatures. Additional insights, based on what was observed last summer, will be provided into how well current forecast models are able to simulate the chemistry and transport of pollutants.

Talbot notes also that, like the university’s prominent role in ICARTT itself, UNH’s hosting of this meeting is a feather in its cap because scientific gatherings of this size and importance are generally reserved for special sessions of the American Geophysical Union meetings or the like. This will be the first meeting of some of the finest minds in atmospheric chemistry well before next fall’s AGU meeting in San Francisco.

And, says Talbot, “Until you hear what everybody’s found it’s really hard to develop any answers, until you can see how the whole thing fits together it’s hard to pull out the real simplified gems.”

Editors: The ICARTT meeting will be held in the Granite State Room of the Memorial Union Building on the Durham campus beginning Tuesday, August 9, and running through Friday morning on August 12. Scientists will be available for reporter’s questions Wednesday and Thursday. There will be nearly 100 posters graphically displaying the ICARTT data.

By David Sims Science Writer Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space (603) 862-5369 david.sims@unh.edu

Sia's comments: UNH's science department is not a "lightweight" source. We'd do well to HEED the alerts our nation's scientists are sending us about what we are doing to the environment with our pollution. Our air quality, our water safety, and our very LIVES can depend on it. If the Artic shelf melts down, we are SCREWED whether we realize it or not. The flood of fresh water into the salty oceans will kill billions of sea creatures essential to Earth's ecology... nevermind flooding our land masses, warming the globe even MORE, and most likely, triggering an ice age. All these things are NORMAL occurences to happen to the earth and all have happened before but NOT due to human pollution and not over a period of 150 years of "triggers" due to POLLUTION. We won't LIKE Mother nature if we don't start listening.