Research Assistant Professor

My primary research area is the auroral zone of the Earth's ionosphere, and the physics of energy transport into, out of, and through this region. I am studying electric current instabilities, wave-particle interactions, and the outflow of ionospheric ions into the magnetosphere. The auroral ionosphere is reachable by small sounding rockets, making it a great laboratory for plasma physics in space. Sounding rocket programs, because of their roughly 3-year cycle from proposal to completion, are ideally suited to graduate student projects.

Current Projects:

Enstrophy: A sounding rocket mission, to be launched from Poker Flat, Alaska, in winter of 1999. This mission will study the filamentation of auroral arcs and currents using a fleet of four small free-flyer magnetometers (supplied by JPL) to make a multi-point measurement of B.

Dust: A dust detector for the Cornell Sporadic Atom Layers sounding rocket, which will be an equatorial mesospheric mission flown from Puerto Rico in winter of 1998. The dust detector, built by graduate student Lynette Gelinas, is a Faraday cup which collects the charged component of the mesospheric meteoritic dust population.

Localized Ionospheric Particle Acceleration: A sounding rocket data analysis research program to investigate the acceleration of ionospheric ions and their outflow into the magnetosphere.

Polar: The Polar satellite mission carries the Hydra particle instrument (Principle Investigator, J. Scudder, University of Iowa) to measure electrons and ions in the polar regions. I am studying data from this mission to look for high altitude signatures of current instabilities and ion outflow.

Cluster: The Electron Drift Instrument for the Cluster spacecraft will measure electric fields using a drifting electron beam. At UNH we are developing algorithms to direct this beam so that it returns to the spacecraft.

New Mission