Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771
ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM
Rescheduled for
Monday, February 11, 2013 /
3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium
Antti Pulkkinen
"Space Weather and What NASA Is Doing About It"
ABSTRACT -- As our technology advances we are becoming more and more vulnerable to new kind of weather, "space weather." We have witnessed increasing vulnerability to space weather since the 19th century when it was discovered that the telegraph system is impacted by solar activity and the resulting geomagnetic storms. Since then technologies such as power grids, global navigation satellite systems and radio communications have been developed and discovered to be vulnerable to the fury of the Sun.
The nature of NASA's high tech activities exposes the agency primarily to two types of space weather hazards: impact on spacecraft and humans in space. Energetic charged particle radiation, a key element of dynamic space environment, is capable of damaging technological and biological systems both inside and outside the protective blanket of the Earth's magnetic field. Consequently, passive radiation hardening of space-based systems plays a major role in the design of the equipment. NASA Johnson Space Center's (JSC) Space Radiation Analysis Group (SRAG) and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center's (GSFC) Space Weather Research Center (SWRC) provide data and analyses enabling active mitigation of space weather hazards based on advance warnings and general space situational awareness.
While JSC SRAG is the primary service provider for the manned space exploration side of the agency, GSFC SWRC's mandate is to provide space weather information for the NASA's robotic missions. This involves monitoring and predicting space weather phenomena essentially throughout the entire solar system, which given the fairly immature state of the field of space weather can be a major challenge. In this seminar I will review some central concepts associated with space weather. I will also describe the basic functions of SWRC and show how we use state-of-the-art data streams and models to push the frontiers of space weather monitoring and forecasting.
SPEAKER -- Dr. Antti Pulkkinen is currently Associate Professor at the Catholic University of America and Associate Director of the Institute for Astrophysics and Computational Sciences. He received his PhD in theoretical physics from the University of Helsinki, Finland in 2003. Subsequently he joined the nonlinear dynamics group at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center to carry out his postdoctoral research during years 2004-2006. Dr. Pulkkinen's PhD and postdoctoral research involved studies on both ground effects of space weather and complex nonlinear dynamics of the magnetosphere-ionosphere system.
Dr. Pulkkinen has been leading numerous space weather-related projects where scientists have been in close collaboration with the end-users of space weather information. In many of these projects, his work has involved general geomagnetic induction modeling and modeling of space weather effects on pipelines and high-voltage power transmission systems. Recently Dr. Pulkkinen has been leading the development of novel operational space weather forecasting activity at NASA GSFC. He also launched a new Space Sciences and Space Weather graduate program at the Catholic University of America to address the growing national need for space weather scientists and forecasters. Dr. Pulkkinen is the main or co-author of more than 50 peer-reviewed scientific articles.