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Space Rocks!
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Too New for Textbooks

In July 1969, when man first landed on the moon, Lynn Kistler watched the event on television with her grandfather, Adolf Busemann. A German aerodynamicist who, like Wernher von Braun, was brought to the United States after World War II to help with the American rocket program, Busemann pioneered the theory of angled wings on planes for high-speed flight. From her grandfather—as well as her father, an aeronautical engineer in the space program and her mother, a math major—Kistler inherited her enthusiasm, love of science and sense of humor. She can remember her grandfather singing an "Annie Get Your Gun" song with new lyrics: "There's no business like flow business, like no business I know!"

Since arriving at UNH in 1990, Kistler has worked on projects studying aurora, ionized particles and reconnection, and she's building an instrument for Stereo, a two-satellite project to study coronal mass ejections on the Sun; UNH's $7 million part of the mission is headed by Antoinette "Toni" Galvin.

A part of the team that built an experiment for the Cluster missions, Kistler analyzes the data Cluster II transmits back to Earth. And she is in the process of proposing a detector for a new NASA mission called the Radiation Belt Storm Probe. The radiation belts are bands of energetic electrons and protons trapped in circular orbits around the Earth; the particles are energetic enough to damage satellites.

Close, But No Cigar—Yet

Not all space scientists at UNH build instruments that fly in space. Amitava Bhattacharjee, who holds the Peter T. Paul Chair of Space Science, uses mathematics and computer simulation to try to make sense of what the experimentalists discover. As a space plasma physics theorist, he seems positively delighted to tackle tough problems like reconnection, "dusty" plasmas and turbulence, and elated at the opportunity to shed some light on the subject for a non-scientist. "Think of magnetic fields as rubber strings," he suggests. "They carry energy like a sling made out of a rubber band. If you stretch it, the tension in the rubber band is converted into the speed of the stone." While discoveries in plasma science have led to breakthroughs such as the process the semiconductor industry uses to make miniaturized silicon chips, scientists like Bhattacharjee are quick to note that practical applications are not what primarily drives space or plasma physics. "I will not make a causal connection that because of magnetic reconnection research, you can produce better plasma TVs—that would be too tenuous," Bhattacharjee says. "What I can say, though, is that it's the mindset that makes us ask why things work the way they do, and try to answer fundamental questions, that may result eventually, in an unplanned way, in producing something that might actually be useful to people."

Fellow theorist Terry Forbes agrees. "The main reason I do this is not for practical reasons—otherwise I'd be an engineer—it's the intrigue of finding out these phenomena," says Forbes, who studies solar flares and coronal mass ejections, and with Bhattacharjee, recently received a $375,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to study reconnection.

Solar flares were first observed in 1859 by English astronomer Richard Carrington, and they still defy explanation. "But we're getting closer," says Forbes. One of the reasons for recent progress is the pictures of the Sun taken by telescopes aboard space observatories. "For a long time, all we had were images of the surface of the Sun," he notes. "We didn't realize it was a more complex structure. If it's invisible to you, you have no hope of getting it right."

Forbes and Bhattacharjee spend a lot of time collaborating with colleagues like Torbert as they design space instruments. "We tell him [Torbert], 'If that's the case then this should happen,'" Forbes says. "'If that didn't happen, think again.'"

Bhattacharjee believes that it's a great time to be working in space physics, and an even better time to be a young person starting out in the field. "Look at the whole gamut of observational information that we have now. That was totally unavailable to someone like me when I started out," he says. "We're at a very exciting stage right now, and I think even greater things will occur in the next 25 years." ~

Rachel M. Collins '81 is a freelance writer who lives in York, Maine.

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