ASSURE Projects Summer 2017

Electron acceleration and scattering in the Van Allen Radiation Belts and auroras
Advisors:
Forrest Mozer & Oleksiy Agapitov & Ivan Vasko


The Van Allen Radiation Belts surround the Earth with energetic ions and electrons that are trapped in the Earth’s magnetic field. Some of these particles escape along high latitude magnetic field lines to enter the upper atmosphere where they make visible auroras. In spite of a half-century of satellite research, it is not understood how these charged particles are accelerated and scattered along the magnetic field to make auroras. These processes involve waves in the ionized gas. A recently emphasized non-linear wave is called a Time Domain Structure or TDS. This wave consists of millisecond duration spikes of electric field that travel along the magnetic field with velocities as high as tens of thousands of km/s. Their generation mechanism remains unclear so the present project will attempt to unravel their generation through computer simulations and analysis of the Korteweg-deVries equation that describes such processes. The results of these computer simulations will be compared with theory and with particle and wave observations made on the Van Allen Probe pair of satellites.


The Eclipse Megamovie Project - Instrument testing and software development
Advisors:
Juan Carlos Martinez Oliveros & Laura Peticolas


The primary goal of the Eclipse Megamovie Project is to produce a high definition, time-expanded video of the total solar eclipse that will cross North America from the northwest to the southeast on August 21, 2017. The Megamovie video will be pieced together from images collected by citizen scientists at various points along the eclipse path. This will provide continuous datasets that far exceed what any one person could capture from a single location, where the longest duration of totality possible would be under three minutes. The Eclipse Megamovie, by contrast, will be about two hours long.
This project involve testing the different equipment that will be distributed to citizen scientists as well as writing software for the automatic operation of the optical systems as for data analysis (http://eclipsemega.movie).

 

Are We Alone? The Search for Extraterrestrial Civilizations

Advisors:
 
Dan Werthimer & Vishal Gajjar

We have several radio astronomy projects in SETI and Fast Radio Bursts (FRB's):
1) Analysing data from the SETI@home or SERENDIP6 SETI project at the Arecibo Observatory
2) Studying giant radio pulses from the Crab Nebula to see if they could be the cause of FRB's
3) Developing SETI and FRB Instrumentation and Software Signal Detection Algorithms for the FAST telescope in China (the world's largest telescope). 
4) Developing Graphical Interfaces for the above experiments

 

Synchronizing Greenland and Antarctic ice core using variations in cosmic ray flux
Advisors:
Kees Welten & Alex Bixler


The West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) Divide ice core was drilled to a depth of 3405 m, and represent roughly 65,000 years of climate information. To interpret the climate records contained in this ice core, it is important to align its timescale with that of the Greenland ice cores using common chronological markers. The upper 2000 m of the WAIS Divide core has been dated with high precision by annual layer identification and by aligning the 10Be record of the core with the absolutely dated 14C tree ring record. Both 14C and 10Be are radioactive isotopes that are produced in the atmosphere by cosmic rays; while 14C enters the global carbon cycle, 10Be is deposited onto the Earth’s surface within 1-2 years of its production. In polar regions, the 10Be is trapped in the snow. The 10Be flux is largely independent of climate signals since its production varies with solar activity and the geomagnetic field. Therefore, the 10Be record in ice cores provides independent chronological markers (similar to volcanic ash layers) that can be used to synchronize ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica. We have measured 10Be in the top 2500 m (the past 20,000 years) of the WAIS Divide core and are working on the bottom 500-600 m of the core (30,000 to 65,000 years ago), where the timescale has the largest uncertainties, limiting our understanding of the timing of abrupt climate events in Antarctica relative to those in Greenland during the last ice age. The main objective of this project is to write a python code that enables us to optimize the synchronization of 10Be records in different ice cores. 

 

 

 

Space Weather During Summer 2017

Advisors: 

Thomas Immel & Colin Triplett

 

As part of the Ionospheric Connection Explorer mission, the Space Sciences Laboratory runs a model of the near-Earth space environment, fed by recently collected data from several different sources. The TIEGCM model will also incorporate data from the mission while it is in flight. Before the launch in November 2017, this modeling environment needs to be set up and tested, to run automatically when new data are downloaded, and produce summary plots of its different data fields. These include parameters as specific as the height of the ionospheric peak around the planet, to it's density, or the total abundance of plasma around the planet. The neutral atmospheric parameters can also be plotted. The zonal wind, the zonal mean zonal wind, the abundance of oxygen vs the abundance of nitrogen, etc.In preparation for the arrival of mission data and regular running of the model, the TIEGCM can be run with realtime sources that are already prepared for the mission and being generated/delivered today. The task is to gain a familiarity with the TIEGCM, the UNIX environment that it is run in, the necessary inputs for it to be run, and develop the capability to run the GCM daily to produce a space weather summary for each week of the summer and beyond.

Space Weather During Memorial Day 2017

Advisors:

Thomas Immel & Colin Triplett

The largest geomagnetic storm occurred during Memorial Day weekend 2017. This kind of event is a focus for the ICON mission, in measuring the competing effects of terrestrial and solar drivers of space weather. The ICON mission flies in 2017, but the mission already has the capability to simulate storms like this one here at the Space Sciences Laboratory. This is because models are used to provide a broader picture of events of which ICON can only see part. The recent storm offers several opportunities: first to test the interfaces that provide the data from repositories to the models that run at SSL and second to test the models to see how well they simulate the storm effects. Further, these simulations provide a capability to provide simulated Level 2 data products (geophysical data on geographic coordinates) for the instrument suite that was running through that weekend in its final test.


Smart PV

Advisors:
Carl Pennypacker
Over the past decade, advances in high quantum efficiency photo-voltaics that can withstand high temperatures has opened up a niche for use of concentrated photo-voltaics (CPV) in developing nations. We hope to produce a system that can provide double or triple the power for the same cost in flat panel systems.  A CPV employs a lens and a tracking motor, and can concentrate about 400x the normal solar incidence into a small pv cell, of about a cm in diameter.  Now we have several cells, a Fresnel lens, and significant progress on the design of such a system.  ASSURE students would complete the design (using Solidworks, for example), and then from inexpensive parts, assemble the first working proto-type.  The ASSURE students would join a  team of two French students (Vincent Basset and Bastien Rebulliot), who are working on this project for three months, and the ASSURE student would assume control  in a one-month overlap period in June.  We have eager customers in Kenya and Uganda who will want to use the French and ASSURE students' world's first prototype of such a system.

 

Mapping the Early Universe with POLARBEAR

Advisors:

Oliver Jeong & Adrian Lee

The cosmic microwave background is the remnant radiation from the Big Bang and has been a fundamental tool for experimental cosmology since its accidental discovery by Penzias and Wilson in 1964. POLARBEAR-2/Simons Array is the next generation upgrade to the successful POLARBEAR telescope in the Atacama Desert of Chile, mapping the polarization of the cosmic microwave background in the southern sky. It will consist of three telescopes with three-meter mirrors, with two of the three cameras to be tested and characterized this summer. Depending on their interests, students will have the opportunity to choose from a variety of different projects related to building, testing, and characterizing different components of the newly built cameras of Simons Array. One potential project is to design, fabricate, and characterize the optical and thermal performance of the windows of the cameras. Another potential project is to design and build the temperature monitoring system of the cameras.



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