Heliophysics is the study of the Sun,
but not just the Sun – the Sun’s influence on everything in the solar system.
Interacting with planets, with moons, asteroids, comets
– even the spacecraft and people we have in the solar system.
And the work we do here at Goddard is unique
because we have the largest collection of Heliophysicists in the world,
that cover the gamut of theory and modeling to answer fundamental questions
which then drive the development of instruments and missions
missions and also address something that’s crucial
to our understanding and our society: space weather.
Space weather effects can come in many ways,
and it can be caused by different things, for example solar flares,
which are abrupt eruptions of radiation, or coronal mass ejections — CMEs —
which are big explosions of particles that travel several million miles per hour.
These events also can actually accelerate
highly energetic particles to very high velocities.
It can cause problems in the instrumentation of satellites,
problems in communications, GPS signal loss, and even power grid disruptions.
We depend too much on this kind of technology and that’s why we have to study
and it’s critical for us to study —
the near-space environment, the space weather, so we can understand how we can mediate these events.
Theory and modeling is very important to everything that we do in the Heliophysics science division
to quantify what measurements are needed to distinguish between competing explanations of an outstanding question.
It is important to know what to measure, where to measure, and to what accuracy to measure.
This is the sort of information that theory and modeling efforts provide.
Then armed with that information instruments developers and mission PIs
can design their instruments and operational approaches to ensure that their missions will be successful.
I work with the Community-Coordinated Modeling Center, a multi-partnership agency established in 2000.
The core goals are to actually support the research in space weather
and also to facilitate the development of next-generation space weather models and tools.
. As a part of that, we do a service of monitoring and doing forecasting for NASA missions.
And we do this in the way of having an in-house,
real-time prototyping of the new tools so we can prepare the models and the tools to operations.
In order to understand solar energetic particles, we have to detect them in space.
So to detect them, we need to use modern instrumentation
— and there are instruments based on modern simulator and modern readout devices.
The way that simulators work is that they actually produce a tiny amount of light as the particle traverses through the scintillator.
Now the key is to be able to measure that light — that very small amount of light.
What our lab has actually been doing is taking modern devices — these are silicon photo-multipliers —
— and making large area arrays of them — that can replace the bulky photo-multiplier tubes of the past,
so we can actually fly this type of miniaturized technology on SmallSats, such as cubesats.
As a scientist, the dream is to have something really beautiful,
really captivating that you can talk to people about, but you can actually get very detailed pieces of scientific information.
The aurora is arguably the most visually captivating manifestation of this relationship between the Sun and the Earth.
What we do in our lab is we try and actually fly rockets that go through the aurora,
and above the aurora, and then come down, in the very short timeframe
timeframe so that we can capture the particles that are creating it over here,
and we can also have the opportunity to look at the light from below.
And with those instruments, we have two goals.
We want to know how many particles did we get, what energies were they at,
, and other properties, but these are the most important usually.
Data drives theory and modeling, which then drives new instrumentation and missions,
which ultimately brings us new data and starts that cycle of discovery all over again.
The work that we do here in Heliophysics is so important,
and has many broad implications both for planetary science in our own solar system,
and beyond to planets around other stars, so-called exoplanets.
. By understanding the extreme space weather that these close-in exoplanets are constantly encountering,
we can understand whether these planets are in fact habitable,
and we can derive a better understanding of space weather and its impacts for our own planet and way of life.
One exciting aspect of what we do in the Heliophysics Science Division is in fact a fundamental goal of NASA –
– to communicate the science and technology which we and our colleagues develop,
through science communication, science outreach, and science education.
And we’re embedded with the largest collection of space and Earth scientists.
This allows for a truly cross-disciplinary group that’s not only addressing NASA’s goals in Heliophysics,
but NASA’s goals across all the science disciplines,
and supporting all the missions that NASA and its partners bring to the world.