Evening everybody thank you for being here tonight. My name is Bobby Braun I'm a professor in aerospace engineering at Georgia Tech and I'm also the director of the Center for space technology and research at Georgia Tech just a quick advertisement but the Center for space technology and research or for Sistar is a Interdisciplinary Center at Tech that integrates all of the diverse space activities they're going on across campus be they in the College of Science in engineering over at the Georgia Tech Research Institute really or anywhere on campus so it's an organization that tries to integrate the faculty the students the staff that all have interests in space and I imagine those of you that are here today have interests in space or you wouldn't be here I hope. And so see Star which is something you might want to check out on the web may be of interest to you I also want to do a just a quick thank you to the Atlanta set science tavern we have Atlanta science tavern folks who raise your hands yeah great so we're really quite happy to have you here with us today thank you all for coming and we hope to do more joint activities over time something that I really like to accelerate if possible. So this is a this is a distinguished seminar it's part of the seastar distinguished seminar speaker series we do at most two of these an academic year and we try to bring frankly we try to bring superstars from the space sector to Atlanta to talk to us about science or commercial space or exploration or whatever they're a superstar in and I'll tell you that today we have one of those superstars with us our speaker today is Dr Daniel Baker and. And Dan is the director of last last is the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado Boulder last is about roughly speaking it's about five hundred people about one hundred million dollars a year and for those of us in university circles the last is the envy of our world last is what we all want to be because from last they build instruments they fly missions they operate those missions in space they have a consortium of engineers and scientists undergraduate students graduate students all working together on these spacecraft and they do remarkable things there and you hear some of that in particular on the Helio physics side in Dan's talk today if that wasn't enough Dan is also a distinguished professor of planetary and Space Physics at C.U. Boulder he holds a chaired position in space sciences. Dan first he earned his Ph D. while working for James Van Allen and I think many of you know who James Van Allen is. I pride myself on publications I talk to my students about publications all the time Dan Baker is the author a co-author of over eight hundred publications in the field and he's edited eight books on the topic of space physics. Makes me look bad actually makes most of us look bad he's a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a fellow of almost every professional society you would want to be a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union the International Academy of astronautics. The American Institute of aeronautics and astronautics and the American Association for the Advancement of Science he served on numerous N.R.C.. Committees and most recently served as chair of the Energy Committee on solar and Space Physics. And in particular was a part of that committee when they did the most recent Decadal Survey for the Helio physics area and I think you'll you'll hear about that some today I imagine he's been awarded a number of honors many of which I'm going to have to you know frankly I'm going to have to skip because there are so many but let me just point to a couple the American Institute of aeronautics and astronautics Jame van't James Van Allen space environment award and medal and most recently the vicar. Professorship at the Indian physical research laboratory in India. As you can tell from this introduction and by the way I abbreviate it a great deal Dan is quite accomplished in the field I know from working at NASA and from being a part of the space sector for most of my adult life that he is one of the go to experts in the field very well respected and it's a great honor for us to have him here today and. Thank you. Bobbie I was blushing the whole time we were speaking there I doubt that I could live up to the introduction but thank you very much it's a tremendous privilege and pleasure for me to be here and I'm just delighted to be able to be part of the series of speakers about that have come here to see Star and as the title indicates I'm going to talk about missions that our lab is involved in or has been involved in and I'm going to try to. Look not only backward but forward and if I can get the thing to work here. Let's do I have to maybe turn despite all the introduction I probably need an engineer here to help me. Turn on the. OK I'm going to just use the there as here OK maybe we'll get it working. We're paralyzed entirely. OK so I like to quote Thomas Jefferson about looking to the future and the past and he said I dreamed I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past and I share that view I really like Professor Brown really well I want to invigorate and and pursue aggressively and exciting future in space research but we can learn a lot by looking back at the the history. Of the space involvement and looking back at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics some of that is shown here that the the laboratory grew out of the physics department which is a very distinguished department to see you remain so today really the goal of an initially was to use experiments on sounding rockets these were. Using captured German B. two rockets the arrow B. rockets to study the sun in the upper atmosphere in one thousand nine hundred fifty for a number of personnel from the what was then called the upper air laboratory spun off to form what is now the Ball Aerospace company and in one nine hundred fifty eight all this of course occurred before NASA was really formed as a Agency one hundred fifty eight NASA was formed under President Eisenhower in one thousand. Nine The upper air laboratory and then are all measured together and they will research lab measured the spectrum of the sun made first X. ray observations in the early sixty's the name was changed to the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics and in the one nine hundred sixty S. as well last moved from studying primarily the sun in the earth to looking at other planets and so today as Professor Brunn discussed last was involved in a lot of different kinds of research topics and themes looking at the planets and I'll talk about that here looking at the influence of solar influences measuring the total solar array to understanding the atmosphere of the earth and the other planets and Space Physics and. Last over the years has been involved in many deep space missions many Earth orbiting missions and I a very large number of suborbital rocket experiments not to mention balloons and although I'm emphasizing the experimental aspect of things I'm also equally proud of the data analysis and the theory that is done in support of this and so with the many researchers from many different departments of at the University I think we are privileged to have a very comprehensive solar space physics and planetary program this is an illustration of the. Of the mission kind of line up according to different objects from the sun out to Mercury to even former planets like Pluto and looking at the kind of mission over time so this is starts in about one nine hundred sixty and goes on to the into the near future and I guess what one of the things I would point out is that in the earlier days the lab was. Tended to be involved in one or two major. Missions at any one time and and then I think since the mid ninety's or so we've been involved concurrently in many different kinds of missions both solar planetary and earth oriented missions I'm going to talk to you about a number of the things from the earlier days and then go on to talk as well about the future opportunities that are coming down the pike for us a person like to talk a little bit about the Sun The Sun is a as a driver of of our solar system and our trust role environment and we are to have been in a golden age in our in a golden age of solar observations these are this is not an artist's concept but really an image of the active sun showing a prominence and the bright active region on the sun and of course. The field of solar trust real physics is often called helium physics in the Assa and this is again showing data from from the operating planets operating spacecraft that are studying the sun right now but one of the things that I think it's very important for us to understand is that we live in the outer atmosphere of a magnetically active star photons that started out at the center of the central furnace of the sun maybe take one hundred thousand years to migrate out through this radiative zone and then the outer part is really constituted of hot gases the near the equator are rotating spinning faster than near the poles this kind of differential motion leads to very strong dynamo kind of action and gives rise to powerful magnetic fields emanating from the Sun The Sun has a surface with a roiling boiling surface active on all kind of spatial and temporal scales there. And also be a powerful emergence in localized regions of intense magnetic fields these are called sun spots and the sunspots are major sources of activity that can affect the earth and its technologies the sun and now we're going from artist concept again to data from modern day spacecraft and looking at the. Active regions on the sun that can have spectacular effects when and if and when those reach the earth the kind of active regions are associated with strong emanating magnetic fields and those magnetic fields stretch far out into space and if we look at the sun that's its bursting material on all spatial and temporal scales again these blasts of material can represent perhaps ten billion tons of material being expelled at several million miles an hour and if those are directed toward the Earth they can have very significant impacts as I mentioned. These show the bright active regions in the magnetic field. Tied up in knots exploding into powerful X. ray emissions and those X. rays can also affect the earth's honest fear and radio communication so this understanding of the sun using space based on ground based observations to understand the sun as a driver is one of the principal goals of the space physics community and the physics community and we've been delighted to be part of that a lot of this started in the early years when the NASA first started building the large observatory class kind of missions this shows the first of the orbiting solar observatories back from the one nine hundred sixty S. or so and last and my predecessor at last Charles Bharath really got us involved in putting ultraviolet instrumentation onto these large. Orbiting out in planetary space these. Large observing platform. To study in some detail all of those different wavelengths and features of the sun. In the one nine hundred eighty S. last got involved in a mission that was one of the earliest of the university class kind of missions this is the solar means a sphere explore a semi the main body of the spacecraft was built by our colleagues at Ball Aerospace and the observatory part the sound of it was designed built and integrated and tested at last and so this was a very good example of industry academic cooperation and partnership and this operated for the better part of the one nine hundred eighty S. And it also got the lab started in involving students in the operation and so the students were trained to acquire the data bring the data down from space and to analyze the data and then provided to the science team. This was also the time when some new display tools were developed how many of you have ever used idea as a scientific analysis tool let's see if you hear this was developed by David Stern who was one of the young students working on Yes I mean project and he spun off to form his company that today markets ideal so going on in the solar arena of the solar radiation and climate experiments source was designed and built for. Again a small investigator class P.-I class kind of mission this was developed from one nine hundred ninety eight on where it was launched in January two thousand and three continues to operate beautifully and on the left side here is sort of the quiet sun and on the right side is the more disturbed Sun I think you can just by visual inspection see the very different kind of outputs in the in the soft X. ray kind of regime but the goal of the sort. Among other things was to really measure the total energy output of the sun to make a comprehensive measurement of all the wavelengths and all the energy and in doing so source went from I certainly to a thousand times better sensitivity and an accuracy of measurements and it dramatically changed by a factor of of a few the uncertainty that one had about what the total energy output of the sun which is what's shown here over Fung over time so this is very crucial for understanding the energy that goes into the earth's atmosphere and ultimately drives climate change so it's on the backdrop of this that we study today. The sun and it's totally Radiance is a principal input to climate models. Now moving to essentially the present time as far as instrumentation the so it an Amex Observatory was the first of the NASA missions really directed toward understanding the sun. And in space weather sense to really be making continuous very high time resolution measurement of all the sun's different properties and so S.D.O. was launched in two thousand and ten that continues to operate very well and last again was very proud and pleased to be able to make the measurements of the. Ultraviolet bands of the sun's output and these again are the principal driver for the upper part of the Earth's atmosphere so S.D.O. has also I think returned some of the most spectacular pictures of the Sun This is a composite showing wavelengths from the near ultraviolet through the near infrared and you can again see I think those are just the breathtaking kind of detail that these images provide of the active regions as well as the more quiescent regions on the sun. As well as it's Corona. So if we now go on to look at the that's the sunward that's the driver of the system let's look at the response end of the system so here I've highlighted the names of a few of the missions that I think have played a very important role in understanding more of our home planet in space one of the things that we often see in textbooks are pictures of the magnetosphere James Van Allen and coworkers in the one nine hundred fifty S. discovered that the earth is enshrouded in these belts of high energy particles over time many other space missions have have tried to put together the picture of this kind of cartoon picture of what the. Earth space environment really looks like and it's got more and more complex with current systems large scale current systems and many kind of magnetic connectivities and boundaries but as we have learned by my continued modern observations the cartoon pictures are really quite misleading of course the magnetic field around the earth that constitutes the magnetosphere emanates from the. Molten Core of the earth the magnetic field lines there are undulating and and varying on again all kind of temporal scales and these nice smooth boundaries that are drawn in the cartoons are really again quite misleading they're really changing on all of these and and again are oscillating and changing continuously and then the flow of this hot gas from the sun moving out at four hundred clobbers a second or greater can really distort and leads to an elongated magnet a tail like a comet tail on the night side of the earth gives rise to these kind of boundaries between the Earth Where'd the earth plasma and the solar wind plasma and the magnetic fields then contain the cold plasma that's in sort of equilibrium with the Earth's upper atmosphere but also that there's a band called The Extraterrestrial ring current a very high. Energy ions that's around the earth and then there are the Van Allen belts themselves the dual belts that were discovered back in Van Allen stay and so the flow of this solar energy or bathing and Bella ping the Earth's magnetic field can store energy on the night side this energy can be dissipated rapidly. Especially important is the process by which magnetic field from the sun can interconnect or so-called reconnect with the magnetic field of the earth opening the gate and letting more energy into the magnets for IT system if that happens with sufficient strength then one can really get a very powerful flow of energy down into the Earth's polar regions that gives rise to and handsome and of all these other domains I talked about but can be especially important for enhancing the Aurora that that are such a beautiful display in the northern and southern polar regions and so looking down in space on the Earth from space one can really see the auroral displays and of course from Earth these are represent spectacular examples of the kind of space weather that we talk about and so in this talk I'll talk in more detail about a couple of the missions that we have operating right now and which last has been controlling quite substantially to both the Radiation Belt Storm Probes and the magnets for multi scale mission. Now I couldn't resist talking about one of my favorite little spacecraft Sam pax the solar novice Magnus particle Explorer which operated from the middle of one thousand nine hundred two to two thousand and twelve and this was a spacecraft that was making measurements of the Van Allen belts. What is shown here in a color coded way this is a log of the intensity by the way so this is several orders of magnitude ranging from the blue to the red this is radial distance. From the Earth measured in Earth radio iso this would be two or three to three or three to four three to many of you may know about just stationary orbit spacecraft that operate out in the distance appear to move around with the earth and in a day and so they are useful for communication satellites the globe positioning satellites operate about this distance but anyway the the red. Yellows that you see here mean that the Van Allen belts can be very powerful sometimes they can be very quiet during this time in two thousand and ten plus or minus a couple of years the Sun went through its most quiet phase in the last two centuries or so up at the top is the sunspot number in the black line in the red here is a measure of the solar wind speed which drives a lot of the system I guess my point in showing all of this is that whereas the textbook might suggest that the Van Allen Belts are this very staid quiet and constant kind of thing they really are varying again immensely in intensity over time and depending a lot on one what the sun is doing and so really we we learn time and again that the connected Sun Earth system is one that's driven very strongly by our parent magnetic star now our star also heats our atmosphere as I talked about and Sam picks as I mentioned was launched in one thousand nine hundred two this shows the altitude of the spacecraft it was operating in a nearly circular orbit at about six hundred kilometers altitude as the sunspot activity went up in the around two thousand the atmospheric drag started to bring the satellite down lower and lower and we knew that by the fall of two thousand and twelve that the spacecraft was really going to reenter due to atmospheric drag so this is another form of space weather that's very important for any operating spacecraft it's particular important for the space station and for the Hubble Space Telescope. As the sun becomes more active it's scientifically interesting but can be very damaging as far as Operation of satellites. Another mission that. Has contributed mightily to our understanding of the Earth environment was called the polar spacecraft and one reason I point to this spacecraft was because for its opera for its operational lifetime it really took beautiful images of the of the aurora from space and combine that with measurements of the insitu plasmas and fields and so this is a story that I think. Has been repeated many times is that being able to apply both a telescope and a microscope to the system to be able to look in exquisite detail locally but also to get the global picture is very important. Now a small spacecraft and even smaller spacecraft than what I'm been talking about here was known as the student nitric oxide explore snowy mission this was developed mostly by students it was kind of a back to the Future thing in the one nine hundred ninety S. The There was a goal to show that one could build effective small spacecraft and launch them and operate them for a very modest amount of money so unlike the sample of the polar missions which were north of a hundred million dollars kind of missions this one had a budget of three and a half million dollars and having students to work on it and if I may say students that worked very cheaply the. Possibility of building a quite a sophisticated. Satellite that was looking at the Earth's atmosphere looking at the solar output and making these kind of key comparisons was was great many of these young people who are pictured here back in the let's say the late one nine hundred ninety S. have gone on to wonderful professional careers at NASA at no and other agencies. Some of the best of them are still with us and are now playing leadership roles in our engineering activities at the laboratory this would have been a success if it operated for three months or so it actually operated for nearly six years and returned spectacularly good data about the the sun and about the earth influences and so snowy was really about a meter in diameter and about meter long it spun and as it did so it sampled the different layers of the Earth's atmosphere remotely and as a spinning satellite it was able to gather this information continuously as it made its way around the Earth every ninety six minutes or so really showed that one could do tremendous things for just of a small amount of money comparatively speaking. Now another mission that that we're very proud of that has returned beautiful data of a different sort more imaging kind of data is the Urana me of ice in the magnetosphere MS a sphere around the ice in the media sphere aim mission and this was launched in two thousand and seven continues to operate today and the satellite is one of several that are being operated from our lab in Boulder but this one is geared toward looking primarily at these very ghostly noctilucent clouds that form in the coldest part of the earth's atmosphere which is about eighty kilometers altitude these are ice clouds that form at that high altitude in the summer these a sphere at the polar regions that's the coldest part of the earth's atmosphere at that altitude and these are very very sensitive indicator they're like the canary in the mine shaft about climate change and global change and they are showing by their evolution and continued spreading and earlier and later existence over the course of each year that that's in fact the. Earth's upper atmosphere as the lower atmosphere is is changing before our very eyes. Another mission that we're proud of we didn't play the leading role in this but we worked with our close colleagues at the University of California Berkeley was a five satellite mission called feminists and part of the goal of feminists was to study the process of energy input into the Earth's polar regions that I talked about before but to sort of measure out in deep space what what was really causing those strong oral enhanced Ment's And so the idea of feminists was to have five identical spacecraft have them on a raid in a radial distance and to be able to then look at where processes started and where they sort of ended as far as driving the auroral enhancements and that mission continues to operate today has worked very successfully this one again was very good from a cost standpoint five quite sophisticated spacecraft were built and launched an operated for less than two hundred million dollars So it's in the NASA scheme of things that's quite good. Now if I haven't indicated this clearly enough already I guess I'd like to just say that there really are many many different spatial scales that we have to consider when we're considering the Sun Earth system this is not to scale but the sun is you know hundred fifty million kilometers away from Earth and things that happen on the sun ultimately drive the Earth's system they can lead to enhanced Ment's of energy storage in the magnetosphere as I've indicated to you they can lead to the this a patient of energy through a process called magnetic reconnection I mentioned before very close to the earth but as we start to look at this in even more detail we recognize that what really controls how rapidly this energy is converted is really occurring on a scale of at most. A few kilometers and we really are now trying to. Fly spacecraft that can look right down at the scale of the electrons that are moving around magnetic field lines so just in the less than a kilometer kind of scale size So imagine trying to make concurrent measurements on a scale of one hundred fifty million kilometers down to a few kilometers and trying to put that entire picture together that's what we're really engaged in with a mission called Magnus for multi scale this is the working part of this the core part of this is for spacecraft each of these is about thirteen feet across so quite large spacecraft have booms that extend out one hundred fifty meters tip to tip they're flying around in a five and a constellation and tetrahedral configuration and each of these base craft has twenty five instruments on so a total of one hundred instruments that are all operating concurrently making measurements of the electric fields the magnetic fields the plasmas the energetic particles and these are flying as close together as a few kilometers and as far apart as six hundred kilometers and so this is again like really applying a microscope to studying the interaction between solar plasmas and earth plasmas in this reconnection site and this was launched very successfully on the twelfth of March from the Kennedy from Cape Canaveral Eastern test range we're doing the science operations for this at our lab and. This is proving to be quite a challenging but also quite an interesting program where we're now getting. Hundreds of crossings a day of these kind of reconnection regions on the day side of the earth and we're bringing the data down and making it available to the science community to study the process of magnetic reconnection. So now let's let's talk more about the space where. Or per se the real effects on human technology and so addressing space weather is probably one of the most important applied components Professor Brown and I were talking about this today that this is really one of the things that NASA and our nation probably should be very concerned about so here we are again looking back at the sun looking at these blasts of material coming out from the sun. As those blasts approached the boundaries I was talking about before there can be important effects coronal mass ejections can cause power outages the effects on the power grid. And. The kind of diagram I showed you before is back with us again but now understanding how this process of me making reconnection really gets the energy into the system how the currents flow down into the honest fear and these currents flowing hundred kilometers above our heads or so can couple into the into the pipelines into the power grids they can cause significant effects like the power outage that occurred in Quebec in one thousand nine hundred nine. The facts can also extend to influences on the i honest fear they can affect the radio communication from the eyes for back to the ground this can cause also outages of communication passing through the on a sphere with satellites the effects can extend to the global positioning system can lead to loss of G.P.S. signals or disruption there of this going to affect precision agriculture navigation at sea and these are the kinds of things that we as a modern technological society should work worry about a great deal the satellites operating in their orthe orbit can be strongly affected by the space weather this can affect the electronics and spacecraft can degrade solar panels and can even cause a significant impacts for humans in space for example those. In the space station so understanding not just the underlying science but how that these scientific issues affect our society is and exceedingly important component. Of. The overall space. Physics activity. Now in light of this NASA put together a sort of the applied branch of its research was focused toward the understanding of space weather and that's called Living with a star L.W.'s And we of course saw many examples of virus our studies of the sun understanding the driver but what about the response of the earth and what about the changes that are occurring in the space environment. I spoke to you briefly about the Sam picks mission before it raised many many questions about how particles are accelerated how they're lost and ultimately how they might affect the human technology and so the. Idea was to make much more sophisticated much more capable measurements of the Van Allen radiation belts and the things that led to the Van Allen Belts forming in the first place we were very delighted at our lab to be chosen by NASA to build what is called the relativistic electron proton telescope or repped. Rep who is geared toward measuring the very highest energy of these particles in the earth space and as you can tell by the exclamation part I'm very proud of the instruments that were built there these are the baby pictures this is the of the two flight units and the engineering model and these were built again to measure one to twenty electron volts electrons and up to two hundred make a lecture on protons in the Earth's facility and to contribute their bye to the living with Star program so this was a. Very good mission a very good launch get this started here and. So this was launched at four o'clock in the morning on Aug thirtieth two thousand and twelve a full launch on an Atlas five vehicle from again the eastern test range the two spacecraft were launched together within the shroud of this Atlas five the goal is to put them into nearly identical orbits to follow one another and two by having them somewhat separate spatially one could i Slate The spatial and temporal variations in the system launching in the time it really lit up the sky and the instruments were to be deployed over several month period these you can see I think the wire blooms and so on and so it's really intended to fly through an elliptical large elliptical orbit through the magnetic field and to explore more deeply the Van Allen radiation belts which we expected to see the two kind of belt structure that then Elon told us to look for all those years ago so the instruments were or deployed as expected except we were very anxious to get as much overlap with the sample X. mission that we mentioned before and so we asked not to be turned on as planned thirty five days after launch but rather turn on our instrument three days after launch and we did that and we're very glad we did up here is another of these plots that I of the type I showed you before the radial distance versus time and this is now again showing in color coding the high intensity particles high fluxes of relativistic Lex and so on red and blue and it's lower intensity and what we saw was that we launched right during the heart of a very powerful radiation belt unhandsome an event but then we started to see that this there was a region in the. Since about three Earth radio I just stayed there and stayed there I began to worry that our instrument maybe wasn't working right but that was sort of a foolish thing to believe I guess and so we really recognize that this was a new feature that hadn't been seen before and it sent in essence what it showed was that at times there can be not the outer and inner Van Allen belt but there can be a third belt and we call this the relativistic electron story dring so I'm going to show you now is just an animation as we lay down these orbits in a Meridiani plane in magnetic latitude and this line moves across and shows where we are but what is really here is that we see the Interzone we see which Van Allen discovered and we've we see this band of particles that just stay there and then we see the outer part that varies a great deal we can see that the belts can be completely lost for periods of time and then they can suddenly reappear with much greater intensity so this has really given us a chance to in a sense rewrite the textbooks about the Van Allen belts both how variable they are how intense they can be and that there can be features like this third Beltre of the story during that really were not anticipated with their radically nor had they been seen observationally before I was remarking to some colleagues today that I like to quote the late Yogi Berra who said you can observe a lot just by looking and by by having new eyes to look at these things that are maybe decades old are thought to be well understood can lead to new insights so these results these kinds of results have been published in high profile journals like Science and Nature and really have given us a new perspective on radiation belt science and so this is another way of looking at what I've been trying to tell you here now the earth has been turned on its side in this kind of mapping that we get by flying through the radiation belts can show us things like the two belt or three belt structure show how on a knife. Edge the particles can disappear and reappear and many of these are really driven exactly by the powerful coronal mass ejections I was telling you about before and these kind of solar drivers then to be able to in this modern age to be able to look at the sun and to use so it an Amex observatory to look at the. Mass Ejections that are coming toward the earth and then to see their consequences in the radiation belt data from Van Allen probes is really quite fascinating scientifically. Now another feature of this I'm sure you're getting tired of seeing these radial distance vs time plots but this is. Now like three years' worth of data from the Van Allen probes app at a quite a high energy four million electron volts I like to say that fiscal two thousand and thirteen was pretty good for high energy electrons fiscal year two thousand and fourteen was a poor one for high energy electrons and twenty fifteen has been pretty good again but what really has interested us is another feature here which is that these high energy electrons get in only so far toward the earth we would expect after these are produced this is a strong and handsome an event and you can see that they sort of drift in closer and closer to the earth but they don't go any further than this distance of about two point eight Earth radio this is really quite a puzzle and it really appeared to us that for long periods of time like weeks on end these particles get into a certain distance but go no further and this had the appearance of being an impenetrable barrier for Alter Altavista electrons that something in some way they were sort of running into a almost like a wall in space and why should that be Nature doesn't like to have sharp gradients nature likes to disperse particles and other things that are out of a strong gradient and yet the seem to be so in this paper in Nature in two thousand and fourteen we reported this impenetrable barrier. What we've been finding now lately is that it's not really so much natural processes that are leading to this barrier but it really is something that was had been examined long ago and dismissed but now it really is the case that. Powerful radio transmitters on the earth transmitters that are used by the U.S. Navy for example to communicate with submarines transmitting at megawatt kind of powers up surround the earth in what we could call a very low frequency bubble of radiation the Van Allen probes data show these red things take my word for it show that this this bubble really exists and that it extends out to almost exactly the distance that we see the high energy electrons stop and so the picture that we really are forming here is that it is not strictly natural but it really is human induced effects that are really leading to this exclusion of very high energy electrons and so the electron barrier in the B.L.F. bubble come together in this way that the high energy electrons get into a certain distance these waves emanating from the earth leak out through the atmosphere and form this this bubble that that in turn leads to the impenetrable barrier any particles that try to get into the inside this region are really zapped sort of like a bug zapper and are scattered and lost into the earth's atmosphere. And so in reality we have never seen the earth's Van Allen belts in their pristine state since their discovery in the one nine hundred fifty S. These have been subject to human activity and really have been influenced and sculpted by human manmade radio signals that emanate from these powerful transmitters and this is really quite a and interesting and unexpected aspect of things as well. Now to study the loss of the particles we really want to have something at low altitude in order to compare And so we were delighted that just two weeks after the launch of the Van Allen probes into deep space there was a spall student led investigation from Colorado called the Colorado student space weather experiment this is a small Cube Sat ten centimeter ten centimeter by thirty centimeter little spacecraft that was launched with a number of other small Cube Sats on a launch that occurred on September thirteenth two thousand and twelve this was put into a low relatively high include low altitude high inclination orbit it launched deployed very successfully the first data were received in the middle of September and the systems operated successfully to century to the present time and they just recently gone off the air but this this was led out of a class being taught of the aerospace engineering department my colleague in than Lee is here and Scott payload many of you may know Scott this class used the classroom experience to design the instrument which was adapted from the Van Allen probes use the. Class to design the communication system the power system they did very sophisticated things like using the radio antenna was a piece of Carpenter's tape from from gudgeons. Hardware Store in Boulder and it cost them two dollars and ninety eight cents which they showed on their on their expense about yours but using you know very cheap very low cost materials has allowed one to make spectacular supporting measurements for the main Van Allen probe and other large missions so the component of the program I'd like to talk about now. Is more looking. On the Sun Earth system to a more remote objects the planetary kind of aspects of the of the program and we were again delighted to be selected to be part of the Messenger mission to Mercury this was done in conjunction with the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University and this mission was was designed to study in detail. The planet and the surroundings of the planet Mercury and messenger was dealing with very challenging problems Mercury is sometimes at least is as close as point three a U. to the sun so we see about ten times the solar illumination at Mercury that we do at Earth and the intense heat from the sun was a challenge and so we had to fly in a large looping orbit and spend a lot of time cooling off after we'd flown near the hot day site surface of Mercury but we use this mission to study to compare and contrast the mercury magnetosphere with the Earth's magnetosphere there are many similarities and differences but we've been delighted with many of the results about the surface properties the interior properties have been mapped exquisitely now messenger crashed into the surface of Mercury as pretty much expected on an April of two thousand and fifteen but prior to that we had many Mercury years worth of data and we are acquiring exquisite data at very high time or a resolution like this result from a very recent paper where we're looking here again at the acceleration and transport of high energy electrons using actually the background signals in the Gamma Ray sensors that were flown on the spacecraft so it's been very exciting for us to find that Mercury has many processes like these storms the Jim magnetic storms we see at Earth occurring and it's miniature It's tiny little magnetosphere and. Hearing earth and the other planets is one of the key kind of science things that we pursue. Another mission that we're very proud of is the Mars atmosphere and volatile evolution mission maven which was launched in two thousand and thirteen and got into orbit not quite. A year ago in. In Mars orbit and this is led by my colleague Brewster KOSKY at last and it's really its key goal is to try to understand the solar plant ary interaction especially the evolution of the last of the of the atmosphere the water and so on in the Mars atmosphere and this mission now has had its first round of discoveries six science papers were published in the ember in the journal Science and there were some forty. Concurrent papers published in The Journal of physical Research Letters so it's going to make a big splash about the initial findings from the Mars MAVEN mission. So I like to show this diagram because it's completely misleading the sun. And the planets they're not this close together they're not the right size and they never line up like this other than this is a perfect picture of the solar system but I like to just point out then in sort of a summary way that the studies of the sun which I've discussed a bit here the studies of the inner planets that have been pursued by with instruments from last. Missions I've talked about and some more detail. Missions that are geared toward under the standing of the moon such as the laddie mission which was complete quite successfully last year Mars may have been an upcoming mission with the United Arab Emirates. The Galileo. And Voyager missions at Jupiter and Juno which will get into orbit next year around. Around Jupiter the Saturn. Studies with Cassini and Voyager and of course the flybys of Neptune Uranus and now the very successful fly by of Pluto where which also had the last incident onboard to last send intimates to every planet in the solar system and I have to say former planets Pluto but this has really been a very gratifying and I think important component of the research that we pursue So given all these things that have gone on what what remains for us to kind of do and we're getting very pleased to be propped part of. Some of the great upcoming activities that lay before us one that's in development now that will launch in two thousand and eighteen is called the Solar probe plus mission this will fly deeply into the earth's Corona close as about eight solar radio right into the heart of the Coronal beast and this mission will be geared toward understanding what it is that really accelerates and leads to the very existence of the solar wind and the high energy particles that emanate from the sun so this is a flagship class mission it will launch and make many will go out past Jupiter and then fly back as many times into the Earth's. Senate and then fly alternately into multiple times into the krona of the sun. Another part of the solar studies that we're very pleased to be part of and this is the National Science Foundation ZX Daniel K. in a way solar telescope not so much that last is doing this but that our our neighbors on the top floor of our space science building are now the people from the National Solar Observatory that are overseeing this development of a new four meter. Telescope off axis telescope that's going to look with exquisite precision. At the active regions on the sun this is being built right now in Hawaii on. And will be operational by twenty eighteen as well and so by having our friends from the National Solar Observatory in Boulder working with us and making the solar measurements concurrently from space we think that we're going to really be able to dramatically enhanced the scientific understanding of the sun. Part of bringing the National Solar Observatory to Boulder also entailed hiring several new faculty members and so we've got a great cadre of new young faculty who are really studying the sun and modeling it theoretically as well. So looking at our place in the universe is. Humbling but also gratifying we are proud and we regard as our our remit our area out here to the edge of the solar system and as I mentioned to you having completed the exploration of the classical solar system out to Pluto and now moving beyond to the hyper belt we really believe that the initial reconnaissance of the system has been extraordinarily good but we're looking forward to continued. Detailed observation of the systems as I've described to you our colleagues at the University of Colorado beyond the outer fringes of our solar system of course are also looking to the Ord cloud and and well beyond one of the things that I'm also very pleased and proud about is that last since its launch has been doing the operations the scientific operations for the Kepler mission that's looking for Earth like planets other planets around other stars and to date multiple thousands of new planets have been discovered by the Kepler mission. And if as I alluded to before Kepler and many of the other missions I've mentioned to you are being operated by students from our lab in Boulder and they've been doing a terrific job and they're giving us a wonderful perspective on our place in the soil in the universe and we really do want to understand more about. Our heliosphere how similar it is to other Astra's fears and by comparing and contrasting not just individual planets but also comparing ourselves to other stars in the environments around other stars I think we're going to have a wonderful and exciting future for space physics and as Professor Braun talked about the emphasis on studying by remote observation techniques the outer fringes of our solar system by energetic neutral atom imaging and other techniques and then to compare that directly with the Voyagers that are now flying out through the terminations shock and out to beyond the heliopause I think we in the next years are going to have a tremendous opportunity to understand more deeply our heliosphere in this context of other Astra's fears so to sort of wrap up I guess I'll just say that the age of exploration that began with the Van Allen coworkers and has gone through many phases now has given us this impressive constellation of spacecraft both out in the heliosphere and in the Earth's vicinity and looking back at the sun to study the relationships and as I've tried to indicate to you this is fascinating from a scientific point of view at least from my scientific point of view and it's also I think one that has significant societal implications and I would just kind of wrap up here by saying that I'm I'm so. Pleased and proud of the. Hundreds of people that work at last. Of course asking the key scientific questions but then having the engineering capability to design and build and test space systems that can address those questions to have the facilities to be able to test and calibrate. The instruments and ultimately you do the mission operations and science operations to get the information back. Usually this leads to more questions and so this is a spiral of development but to have the strong student involvement throughout is also a very powerful component of this and it's very gratifying indeed so just let me summarize by saying that I think I hope I've shown you here that last traces its history back many decades now to the supper air laboratory the vision of of people in the physics department lo those many years ago these observations of the space environment have been very central to the mission there are many other aspects but this has been very central to the mission from the beginning and a wide range of these modern measurements really have I think kept at the forefront of the International Space Physics research programs and the application of this knowledge and technical prowess to space weather issues also places the lab an important position for societal relevance which I think is very valuable indeed So with that thank you very much for your attention I'll be happy to answer any questions thank you. Are there any questions yes. OK good I am too I was too. Right. Yes very good question I think everyone heard but the question was on space station and similar systems what materials would one best use to protect the astronauts from it radiation by high energy particles and that's I was talking to a designer just the other day about this who's designing a spinning spacecraft to have one G. by by spin but what was what would be the material best material to use and I think we both concluded that water would be the sort of the best thing to use around the outside and this the reason would be. That what you want to do is to slow down and stop these very high energy particles without creating a lot of secondary particles and so using lighter material things that are rich and hydrogen really would be one of the best ways to do that so having the water around the outside which you'd probably need in the space station anyway but to be able to use that as shielding material and stopping the primary particles without creating a lot of secondary ones is very important if you tried to use lead or something else that would be very heavy and it would create a lot of secondaries and so you'd probably create more problems rather than fewer problems if you try to use that for shielding So whether it's a space station in relatively low earth orbit or something going to Mars and Brian may have thought more about this than I have but I think using light material like water would probably be the best thing to do. OK OK Other questions. Yes. That's great Yes Great great question yes yes so the Voyagers are have been making their way out it's believed that one of them has probably approached and maybe right at that. Point now the with the question of course is that whether with the Voyagers get through these outer boundaries before they run out of power as you probably know they use nuclear power the a Radioisotope Thermoelectric generators those degrade over time and so they will probably get down to a point where they can operate the instruments by the early twenty twenties and I think the evidence is that they will probably make pretty good passes both of the Voyagers will go through these outer boundaries and may even encounter the bow shock in front of the heliosphere by that time and so one of the missions that we've recommended in the Decadal Survey is to have near Earth spacecraft that can do you those distant boundaries remotely by remote sensing techniques at the same time that the voyages are passing out through that So the answer to the simple answer your question is yes probably so that the voices have enough life left in them and enough power probably to do that but it's a very good question other questions yes. Yes. Yes very good question as well so the question of whether it's possible to synthesize all this information and to provide accurate alerts and warnings that in fact is the function of an organization in Boulder called the Space Weather Prediction Center for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Noah and they try to take as much of the scientific information as they can as well as their operational satellites like the go spacecraft and other things and they try to make just such forecasts right now forecasts are pretty good for Chrome. Mass Ejections when they're going to arrive they're getting better and better the big thing that we can't predict right now is what the orientation of the interplanetary magnetic field is and as I was trying to illustrate with some of these diagrams if it's point in the right direction it can be very efficient and create huge magnetic storms if it's in another you know the opposite direction it can be relatively benign and so developing accurate forecasts of exactly how powerful the storms will be has has been a bit problematic but overall I would say that yes the alerts and warnings are extremely valuable the power of the electric power grid for example values having warnings of a few hours or so so they can spin up more power so spacecraft operators find it valuable to know whether intense solar storms are going to be occurring every segment of our technology has in a sense a different kind of sensitivity to different aspects of space weather and so what the know it folks try to do is provide a broad kind of indication of electromagnetic disturbances particle disturbances gym magnetic storms and I think what needs to be done now is to tailor products more to individual kind of industries and provide much more effective alerts and warnings and. In a sense I guess this is what could keep space scientists in business for a while is developing a deeper and deeper understanding of the so that truly accurate forecasts could be made in that many people have said and I guess I agree with this is that we are probably in space weather maybe where meteorology was like five decades ago or something like that we have a long way to go to make sufficient observations and to do the synthesis you're talking about but that's a very very good question other questions. Yes. Yes Well yes that's a very good question and so the question was about the impenetrable barrier I guess I'd just say maybe correct the question in the sense that it's really the magnetosphere particles that are trying to should be drifting closer and closer to the earth and they seem to be prevented by this barrier and so it's not the particles come from the sun that are trying to get there they're really generated by magnetosphere energy zation processes but but the spirit of your question is yes. And. One of the interesting things is that this is helpful in some ways to human technological aspirations because these high energy electrons which are often called Killer electrons because they can have such devastating effect on satellites they're excluded from the region closer to the earth and so if you're interested in flying in a very benign region from a radiation standpoint flying below the barrier is actually a good thing you're not being affected by these particles because they're not there. With respect to your question these particles that that otherwise would be there could be raining down into the earth's atmosphere changing the atmospheric chemistry and so on and the fact that they're not there means that part of the earth's atmosphere is not being affected by them so so in a sense we've been mitigated in the effects of high energy radiation through our inadvertently through our radio transmitters in ways that we probably didn't even know we were doing so if I you know I can make a statement that we've been polluting the Earth's atmosphere for a long time we've also been polluting the earth space maybe in a good way maybe in a bad way but we certainly ought to be and know what we're doing and and we're learning more about that now so it's very good question yes I'm not sure I might seeing OK yes. Well the Carrington of vents affect primary a different aspect of the space weather they are the ones that create these powerful currents flowing in the upper atmosphere that couple into the power grid I think that's the biggest worry it have from a Carrington event another facet of your question may have to do with the energetic particles directly from solar flares and things like that and what about those again these waves affect primarily the Van Allen Belt electrons not the protons and so on so so they're not doing much to protect or a near us to the effects of either solar energetic particles or to protect us against the effects of these powerful or all currents that couple down into the into the power grid in the pipelines and things like that. However what the what we have shown from just very recent studies a paper that's going into the science magazine this week is that that's the high energy electrons from these very powerful storms that otherwise you would expect to come in very close to the earth have been stopped again just like like on a knife edge so so we've shown that it's not just a gradual thing but you can be driving this very very hard right against the barrier and they just stop on a dime practically and I'm you know personally I'm amazed I've seen lots of astrophysical data but to me this is quite an amazing thing that that you could have such an efficient. Barrier in space and can this happen in other systems can it happen more naturally you know can other planetary systems exhibit this kind of thing I don't think we see it I was remarking today that. If you had looked at the Earth in say one thousand nine hundred before these transmitters started you might have seen in ten. Synchrotron emission from these high energy electrons in strong magnetic field wreckless of the earth that probably switched off almost like a light bulb going off when the transmitter started operating and so alien living somewhere you know on your rope or something like that looking back at the Earth might have seen things change almost on a knife edge when when the transmitter started operating so it's kind of interesting to think about. Other questions. Yes. Yeah another very good question and of course the magnetic fields being carried out by the solar wind do keep a lot of particles away from from the inner part of the solar system and so we see this as modulation over the eleven year solar cycle as the magnetic fields from the sun get stronger we tend to exclude cosmic rays and when the fields get weaker the cosmic rays come in with great intensity I mentioned in passing the two thousand and ten you know two thousand and eight two thousand two thousand and ten solar minimum that was the weakest. Solar activity that's been seen in the since the early one thousand nine hundred the galactic cosmic rays were like thirty percent higher than they had been even in the previous minimum so it's really quite quite important that the sun and its its effluence are keeping a very intense cosmic radiation out it's also kind of an interesting thing if the sun is active and you're an astronaut going to Mars you're probably going to get zapped by solar flares and solar energy particles if you go during a very quiet time you're going to get zapped by cosmic rays and so it's sort of hard to win you know what you need is more water as the question you know surrounding your something to protect you but there's always something it's always something in space you know so. Any other questions I don't yes I don't know Bobby How long to OK last question OK. Yeah. Yes gold is a very good shield in some ways Of course it has the disadvantage of being quite expensive and pretty heavy and so it goes back to THE LEAD. I think this gold as a shield I guess General Darren Berger who worked with art of on Brown Brown told a story that general Darren Berger had told him that he wasn't doing things right in procurement the. Von Braun needed some shielding anyone to use gold to do that and there were complaints that it cost too much and so. You're making a mistake he said say that you have to build it out of solid gold and that you're going to save money by just putting gold plating on this and and so Bond Brown I guess learned that lesson applied to the Saturn five program or something but gold is a very effective both as a radiation shield and as a for contempt for heating it's very reflective and so a lot of things are gold covered in gold in order to get have good thermal control properties but going back to the earlier point if you were going to use gold as a shield you'd probably generate a lot of secondary particles because so heavy it creates a lot of secondary radiation when high energy particles collide with it so I go back to the point that using as light mut paraffin or water or other things that are rich in hydrogen is probably the best shield in order to prevent massive secondary radiation dose affects OK Well I think I should probably stop here so thank you again very much thanks for your attention to the great question.