Thomas Immel, Part 1 of 2

Spectrum

Dr. Thomas Immel is Assistant Research Physicist at SSL at UC Berkeley. His expertise is interpretation of remote-sensing data and modeling of physical processes in the upper atmosphere & ionosphere. His work includes UV imaging observations from 4 NASA missions. ICON.

Transcript

Speaker 1: Spectrum's next.

Speaker 2: Okay. [inaudible].

Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews [00:00:30] featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news.

Speaker 3: Good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. I'm the host of today's show. Today's interview is part one of two interviews with Thomas Emmel and assistant research physicist at the space sciences laboratory at UC Berkeley. In April, 2013 NASA selected the Ayana spheric connection explorer or icon to be the next Helio physics [00:01:00] explorer satellite mission. The icon mission is to be led by the space sciences laboratory at UC Berkeley. Thomas Emal is the principal investigator of the icon mission icon will provide NASA's heliophysics division with a powerful new capability to determine the conditions in space modified by weather on earth and to understand the way space weather events grow to envelop regions of our planet with dense ionospheric plasma. In today's interview, Dr Emel talks [00:01:30] about Helio physics, the space sciences lab, and small cube sets, which are small satellites being built at universities. Here's that interview, Thomas Ml. Welcome to spectrum.

Speaker 4: Thank you. Brad, would you give us a short description of heliophysics? Sure. Here's your physics is sort of a new term and it's used at NASA to describe in shorthand the disciplines of solar and space physics. [00:02:00] Together. It's a little controversial because it means solar physics, obviously space physicists and people who studied the upper atmosphere have sort of felt the shift with changing it to solar physics. A lot of focus went to solar physics. I think icon is icon. Our mission that talking about today is shows a, another view of heliophysics or another focus. Can you describe starting at the earth's surface, the concentric layers of the atmosphere and out to [00:02:30] the ionosphere and beyond? Sure, and how do you define a layer of the atmosphere is sort of where you start. What's the answer? The answer is we defined layers of the atmosphere by their temperature profile or how the temperature changes with altitude.

Speaker 4: It's as simple as that and so there are specific layers that on average have a temperature profile, one direction or the other. That means as you go up in altitude, does the temperature drop or increase as you leave the surface of the planet and go up and you're [00:03:00] in the troposphere and as you go higher in altitude, the temperature drops. And that has to do with just basic atmospheric physics. And also the fact that the surface of the planet is what absorbs most of the solar radiation. So it's hot and as you move away from that in an atmosphere that gets thinner without the Tude, the temperature drops. So you go all the way up to the top of the troposphere and you end up with the tropopause. So there's fears and pauses and once you cross the tropopause, you're in the stratosphere, [00:03:30] you know the next sphere and there you've know you've crossed it because temperature start to increase with altitude.

Speaker 4: And they increased because of the fact that solar radiation is being actively absorbed in that region of space. That's not happening in the troposphere. The troposphere is transparent of visible light, but the stratosphere is starting to absorb solar radiation that is harmful to life, UV. And so the heating that occurs, the ozone that's in the stratosphere absorbs that [00:04:00] radiation and basically cause the cause of that place being much warmer. So when you're in the stratosphere though, you've already above about 90% of the atmosphere. It's all on a troposphere the stuff we breathe. So the stratosphere warms up all the way to the top. You hit the strata pause and then things turn around again. The chemistry that supports ozone does not work in the mesosphere and so you end up starting to drop in temperature again. So just like in the troposphere, the base of the mesosphere is the warm [00:04:30] straddle pause and it gets cold from that point.

Speaker 4: And the coldest place in the vicinity of earth is the top of the menopause where those temperatures have been dropping all the way up to the boundary of space up to about 95 kilometers. At that point, you've reached just about the boundary of space and the temperatures turn around again and and warm all the way up into your in space and the, the atmosphere that's left up there, it's called the thermosphere because it's very hot and it's hot again because it's absorbing a different region [00:05:00] of solar radiation, extreme on fire ultraviolet. So again, protecting life on the earth as part of our atmosphere does that in a number of ways. So the thermosphere in that case is also where we find the ionosphere. The thermosphere is hot because the solar radiation is very energetic at that altitude. So energetic that ionizes the gas and that's where you find the ionosphere, you find a layer of plasma density, so ions and electrons [00:05:30] living together in the same place as plasma and that plasma becomes very dense, about 200 to 300 kilometers above the earth.

Speaker 4: That's the dentist plasma between here in the sun. It's why you can hear at night radio tear ran from your ham radio set up if people still do that anymore because you're bouncing radio waves off of that and it's why you can hear, you know, I am stations over a long distance too in the daytime, but it's at night. That layer is all by itself hanging around and you can bounce [00:06:00] radio signals off of it. So then you keep going into space and the plasma density is actually dropped, but you are protected still. You don't enter into interplanetary space until you get out of the magnetosphere. And that's where Earth's magnetic field controls the motion of the plasma. And this is all the way out to 30,000 kilometers. And then you hit the bow shock and the end of the magnetosphere at the magneto pause. Everything has to end and you end up in the solar wind.

Speaker 4: And that's interplanetary [00:06:30] space to interstellar space. And interplanetary space are two different things. We've never been to interstellar space. We're working on that. Voyager is on its way and there's a constant argument over whether or not it's out there. So the sun constitutes the helio sphere. It constructs the heliosphere by its energy and blowing out, and that's the sphere around our planetary system that we're part of. That's right. And that's where voyagers headed out of. Right, right out of the heliosphere. It's leaving and it's not coming back. [00:07:00] And I forget what star it's headed off to. So Helio physics is the study of plasmas and space plasmas and how they interact with bodies, uh, and interact with important things such as planetary atmospheres. Basically anywhere our star is an influence that can influence the processes that occur there.

Speaker 3: Our guest today is Thomas Animal. In the next segment, Thomas Talks about heliophysics discoveries. [00:07:30] This is KALX Berkley. And what have been the big revelation trends

Speaker 4: in heliophysics? Well, the first discovery and Helio physics was the fact that we had radiation belts. It was our first forays into space carried instrumentation. And the first few explorers, which we're still part of that line icon mission, is part of the explore line. But the first ones carried Geiger counters out of University of Iowa where Jim van Allen was in [00:08:00] charge of that department. And where they built those uh, experiments that discovered what we call the van Allen belts now. So that was the first discovery was that we had an environment around us in space that was hazardous and we didn't know where that radiation came from. It fill a Geiger counter just to see what was there. And when you found us a lot more radiation than they thought. The solar cycle has influences throughout the heliosphere. A solar storm for instance, can launch a coronal mass ejection.

Speaker 4: They say these are the words [00:08:30] that are starting to show up in the common discussion of space, whether it was coronal mass ejections had come with a solar flare and we've timed these things. We see a coronal mass ejection, a very large one cause a massive magnetic storm at earth. And a good time later it flies by voyage here and it hits the heliopause and radio waves are admitted from the helio pause, the boundary of interstellar space and voyager picks them up. And those were some of the first studies of void. You're trying to figure out how close [00:09:00] it was to the heliopause. Where we are now in the past 10 years is what we understand more now than ever. That the forcing of plasma in near a space is controlled to a much larger degree than we ever suspected or dare to think or dare to discuss.

Speaker 4: Really it's controlled by conditions in the lower atmosphere and that the atmospheric layers that we've talked about and talked to all the temperature variations that occur, there's processes that carry energy and momentum beyond past [00:09:30] all those pauses and layers straight from the surface to space. And it's actually biggest discovery in Helio physics in the last decade is that this coupling of the terrestrial atmosphere to spaces stronger than we thought. And what is your focus at the space sciences lab? Well, it has been in the upper atmosphere, in the atmosphere, looking at how solar wind energy propagates through the system. Solar Wind, [00:10:00] it impacts or it effects the MAG Nitas fear and the number of ways creates a shape, stretches it out. The magnetosphere is what processes also learned energy that produces the Aurora. The Aurora is energized by the solar wind. All that energy has to get through the magnetosphere and then down into our atmosphere in a number of ways.

Speaker 4: So we're interested in how that energy propagates through the system and how it's eventually deposited in our atmosphere. And then also how our atmosphere and the [inaudible] sphere as you energize them and [00:10:30] make them more conductive through ionization by Aurora, how it feeds back through the system. So magnetosphere occurrence is a current system, electrical current that heats the atmosphere and how you turn that current on and off during a magnetic storm. The timing and how processes work together as sort of as an engineering problem is something I've been focused on for the past 10 years. That's changed over the years too. I've been sliding to lower latitudes where the plasma density is actually highest [00:11:00] and it's highest for two reasons. One because the sun is overhead more often at low latitudes and I NYSE in the atmosphere more actively or more strongly, but also because there's magnetic field tends to trap the plasma at low latitudes.

Speaker 4: And when I say that the plasma is densest in the atmosphere between here in the sun, it's actually the low latitude ionosphere which has the dense plasma that interacts most strongly with the earth's atmosphere. Um, and we know now that the [00:11:30] energy and momentum that propagates up from the lower atmosphere that a lot of that energy is coming up from low latitudes as well. Cause that's where a lot of the energy goes in and tropical rainforest and in the tropical weather systems that curved from day to day with interesting periodicities. The reason you end up with large coupling from the little atmosphere to the upper atmosphere is because the atmosphere can be caused to move a wave like manner and we call it a tide, just like tides in the ocean. The atmosphere tends to have some [00:12:00] 12 hour, 24 hour period of city. Say you have a planet with the Brazilian rainforest on it and that fires up at two in the afternoon every day, day after day you start moving the atmosphere in a periodic manner and you end up growing these really, really large waves in the atmosphere that propagate up into space.

Speaker 4: And so it's the combination of the tropical forcing and the tropical ion sphere, which is dense and captured by the magnetic field really creates this interesting environment and we're a great laboratory [00:12:30] for understanding atmosphere, space coupling.

Speaker 3: Yeah. Listening to spectrum, I am k a l x Berkeley. Our guest today is Thomas Emma. In the next segment he talks about solar energy interacting with Earth's magnetosphere,

Speaker 4: the Aurora [inaudible]. Can you just describe the Aurora for us? The Aurora is a feature of the planet [00:13:00] at high latitudes in the north and the south, the Aurora Borealis of North Aurora Australis down south. What it is, it is light coming from the energization of our atmosphere by space plasma. The Sun obviously has a lot of energy and solar atmosphere is constantly moving out and it's carrying a lot of energy with it. But so that energy arrives at earth as solar plasma blowing past the planet. So those are the energies we're talking about. The magnetosphere as sort of a, [00:13:30] it energizes all of the solar wind particles to higher energies and dumps them into our atmosphere. And the Aurora is what you see when you go out on your deck and Alaska and look up. It's the signature of that process occurring. And when the Aurora's very active, that means that process is very active and there's a lot of energy coming into our atmosphere from the solar wind.

Speaker 4: What's great is a Nikon camera has great red response, so you can point your camera to the sky and you can put it to a two second exposure and it will see things [00:14:00] that you can't see with your eyes. Many people now have great auroral imagers in their mitts. They may not even know that they've got that capability. So the waves that are created around the equator in the low latitudes, in thinking about waves on the ocean, they're moving in a specific direction. Are these waves also moving in the specific direction? Are they sort of emanating everywhere? And that's a good question. So the really large scale waves in [00:14:30] the atmosphere, the first thing is to realize that once you've got a wave moving in the atmosphere, there's nothing really to stop it. The waves aren't going to crash on the shore somewhere. They're going to go up and they're going to grow with altitude, their waves, storms derive, and I am talking about the large scale continental scale waves that the wavelength is as large as a continent, at least horizontally, vertically.

Speaker 4: There's about 2030 kilometers, but 2030 kilometers is a quarter or a third of the way to space. So they're still large even [00:15:00] though 2030 kilometers doesn't sound that far. In any case, those waves grow with altitude and by the time you get to the edge of space, a wave that might have had a half degree centigrade or Celsius variability to it in amplitude, by the time it gets to the boundary of space and crosses it, it can have an amplitude of 20 or 30 degrees Kelvin or our Celsius. It's the same thing. Uh, it's one way to measure the size of that wave. With that wave also comes a large wind component. The winds, the [00:15:30] motion of the atmosphere is going to go with it. It's this sloshing and the temperature comes from the compression and the expansion of the gas. As the wave moves around the planet, do they go in different directions?

Speaker 4: Yeah, we talk about them. We see there's a number of technical terms for the waves. There's eastward and westward traveling waves and some of them are larger than others. This atmosphere supports a couple of waves eastward at a couple of ways, westward more than others. Some of these waves are excited [00:16:00] more naturally than others just because of the source of the excitation, the source of the excitation of the continents. If you look at a map of the earth where lightning occurs on earth, for instance, it's always over the continents because the solar energy is really just being deposited right there at the surface and the atmosphere starts to be put in a motion and the water vapor starts to condense. As the atmosphere rises and you get storms, a tropical rainforest and Africa, tropical rainforests in South America and also a third really large [00:16:30] region of tropical forcing to Southeast Asia.

Speaker 4: Those three places on the earth firing off two in the afternoon in the South East Asia than two in the afternoon, Africa, then South American and do that over again every day. It's like a drum head problem, if you know what I mean. If you put a little sand on a drum and you start tapping it in one position, you can form a pattern. You would see where else you could tap it at the same time to reinforce that pattern. Now the rainy seasons of of those different places changes throughout the year. [00:17:00] That's one of the reasons we know it's from the lower atmosphere because we've observed conditions in space that changed with the rainy seasons and there's no reason to have rainy seasons in space. But we do and so we look immediately to where we do have a rainy season, which is in the troposphere. And so the recent developments and numerical model supports the idea that there's a strong connection between the tropic sun conditions and space.

Speaker 4: Have you been involved in a lot of past satellite projects at the space science lab or a few [00:17:30] of them? I've been involved in too. Recently icon, which I'm leading and a small satellite re recently completed a flue called cinema that was a student led cubes hat, so a 10 by 10 by 30 centimeter satellite that we built at the lab designed and built. Before that I was analyzing data. I've been spending 10 years analyzing data from missions that we've supported or built and so combining data from a number of [00:18:00] different instruments that space sciences lab has built or satellites that space sciences lab has built. It's been something I've done at the lab, but this is my first time leading a mission.

Speaker 5: This is k a l x Berkeley. The show is spectrum. Our guest is Thomas Emma, a physicist at UC Berkeley's space sciences lab.

Speaker 4: How has the [00:18:30] cube sat changed the way satellite measurements are made? Well, in some respects that remains to be seen. There's been a number of advances in the capabilities that cubes hats can carry in terms of pointing and power and the instruments have all had to shrink in size as well. But there's a number of capabilities that have grown over the years that allow us to do that. Cell phones have been a big driver and shrinking small processors and getting [00:19:00] into low power processors and communications gear as well. And what's been nice is working with the students here at Berkeley actually. They've had a lot of experience in designing and programming processors for the purposes that we need to fly in space. So there's a number of universities working in this area now and I think they're just getting better. Cinema has been a good experiment for us.

Speaker 4: We have four of them in the works this year. There's two Korean cinema. It's going up. [00:19:30] Kate, you young, he university was our partner. There's a lot of interest in supporting keeps that launches at NASA and throughout different government agencies and so you know, we went on a national reconnaissance vehicle, but a, it didn't cost us much. It was fantastic that we had that opportunity and NASA has worked with NRO and other agencies to make this possible for universities to do these. There were a number of university keeps that's on that launch. So these cubes hats that NASA embraces, I guess [00:20:00] that's the only way to get up is NASA says, yeah, this is worth putting up there, or are there now independent ways to get to space? I think NASA is where we'd like to start and that's who we've gone to before. NSF is really the organization that was the first to support a cube type program per se.

Speaker 4: And National Science Foundation doesn't have a launch service, but NASA does. So there was a close collaboration early on and some key individuals at NASA Kennedy have taken a remarkable interest [00:20:30] in fostering that program and develop basically what they call a educational launch. Alana was, uh, is the acronym that we went on. Alana. Alana supports a number of, keeps getting into space. You propose to Atlanta, NSF sends them $20,000 or that's it was for us and you get your slot and you get your orbit and you're on orbit for many years. So it's really a great opportunity. So right now it's really good to work with NASA on this, on the cinema [00:21:00] projects. There's quite a bit of student involvement in those. I understand. Can you talk about that? Right. So National Science Foundation supported Space Sciences Labs, cinema project, which is a cube set for high ions, magnetic fields, c I n electrons, it went on it.

Speaker 4: It's a great acronym for a very tough thing, but it's a base whether mission, it's to measure the particle environment in space and the magnetic fields. So that was great. You know, we [00:21:30] miss dearly, Bob Lynne, who was the former head of space sciences lab for more than a decade and the principal investigator on one of our explorers Hesi and the principal investigator on cinema, he put that international team together between CUNY University where he was an adjunct professor. We worked with imperial college as well on that mission and they provided the smallest magnetometer have ever seen for a space instrument. It was a high quality, high precision magnetometer, way better than even your iPhone if you can imagine. Also [00:22:00] we had a detector group at LBL and a group providing an electronic part and aces from France. So it was an unbelievable confluence of people and scientific interests that built cinema.

Speaker 4: The student aspect was, there were students, uh, from the start in mechanical engineering who really came up with the initial design of a cube sat and it was a couple of masters students, one of whom is still a space sciences lab, David Glaser. And it was great working with the Mechanical Engineering Department [00:22:30] because it was that department of which took the controls problem of how you spin a spacecraft based on inputs from space, the Sun Sensor, we had the magnetometer measurements that you're making. So that was a remarkable achievement. I thought on the mechanical engineering side and working with the electrical engineers, we had a number of cs IEC students as well and really had a good team. They're working on interfacing with the mechanical engineering students who were working on the attitude control or working [00:23:00] with the imperial college students and researchers who were providing magnetometer those a number of difficult tasks that we had some great students come through and everyone got their chance to save cinema. It was a seat of your pants operation. The thing flew and it's functional. We are going to fly the next one with some updates that's gonna work better, so we need more students. The wonderful problem with students is that they graduate to go onto great careers and other places and so we'd like to have those people back. They're not coming [00:23:30] back, so we need to get a new crop of ex students and mechanical engineers and we'll probably be flyering at soda again.

Speaker 5: That concludes part one of our two part interview with Thomas Emmylou. Part two will air on 14 in that interview, Dr Hamill discusses icon mission process start to finish. The icon explorer mission website is icon dot s s l. Dot. berkeley.edu [00:24:00] now a few of the science and technology events happening locally over the next two weeks. Rick Karnofsky and Renee route

Speaker 6: present the calendar this Tuesday, June 4th the San Francisco ASCA scientists lecture series. We'll be hosting a talk by two sides. Officers at the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine. You Know Greg Shamor and Kevin Wilson will speak about the potential of stem cell research to help in diseases such as diabetes, spinal cord injury, [00:24:30] heart night disease, and neurological disorders. They will also address the recent restrictions on research and where it is heading today. This June 4th event will be held that the Soma Street food park in San Francisco, the city's first permanent food truck pod. It will begin at 7:00 PM biological anthropologist, Helen Fisher of Rutgers. We'll speak with KQ eds, Michael Krasney about the science of love and attraction. On Tuesday, June 4th [00:25:00] at 7:30 PM at the North Theater in San Francisco, Fisher has written five books on the evolution and future of human sexuality, monogamy, adultery, and divorce, gender differences in the brain, the chemistry of romantic love and human personality types.

Speaker 6: And why are we fall in love with one person rather than another? Tickets start at $20 and are available at cal academy. Dot. O. R. G. On Monday, June 10th Brian Day [00:25:30] deleted Lunar Science Institute director at NASA will give a talk about the latest lunar discoveries as litter robotics continue to advance. Our understanding of the moon continues to change. Well, the lunar surface has been previously viewed as a static desert environment. New evidence points to a far more dynamic moonscape than expected. Dr. David will discuss these new discoveries and elaborate on some of NASA's more recent and lunar exploration missions. The event will be held on Monday, June 10th at 7:30 PM in the California [00:26:00] Academy of Sciences. Planetarium. Tuesday we have tickets for the event. Visit the Academy [e-mail] the Computer History Museum at 1401 north shoreline boulevard in mountain view is hosting senior vice president and director of IBM Research John Kelly on June 11th at 7:00 PM Museum CEO John Holler, well moderate a conversation with Kelly on topics ranging from his background and the path that led him to IBM. [00:26:30] The history of research there, IBM's Watson and cognitive computing to the newest IBM lab in Nairobi, Kenya. IBM says that Africa is destined to become an important growth market. The company admission is free. [e-mail]

Speaker 7: [inaudible]

Speaker 6: [00:27:00] spectrum is to present news stories we find interesting. Rick Karnofsky and Renee arou present. The news engineers at UC Berkeley have created a new hydro gel that can be manipulated by exposure to light alone. The team inspired by plant's ability to grow towards light sources [00:27:30] created their gel by combining synthetic elastic proteins with one cell thick sheets of graphite known as graphene. Graphene generates heat when exposed to light, which can cause synthetic proteins to release water. The two materials are combined to form of hydrogen with one side that is more porous than the other. This allows the material to mimic the way plant cells shrink and expand unevenly in response to light. This hydrogen also shrinks and evenly, albeit more precisely allowing to bend and move solely in response [00:28:00] to light. Create or speculate that the shape changing Gel could have applications in drug delivery and tissue engineering.

Speaker 6: Mathematician Tang Jang of the University of New Hampshire in Durham published unimportant number theory proof and this week's issue of angels of mathematics. Yang proved a weak form of the twin prime conjecture and as the first to establish the existence of a finite bound four prime gaps. Prime numbers are natural numbers greater [00:28:30] than one that I have no positive divisors other than one and themselves. Interestingly, many come in pairs that have a difference of two for example, three and five 17 and 19 or 101 and 103 Jang showed that for some integer n that is at most 70 million. There are infinitely many pairs of primes that differ by n.

Speaker 2: [inaudible]

Speaker 5: [00:29:00] spectrum is archive on iTunes university. Our special link is tiny url.com/k a l ex spectrum. The music heard during the show was written and produced by Alex Simon. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. [00:29:30] Our email address is spectrum dot [e-mail] join us in two weeks at this same time. [inaudible].

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