HYBRID – General Meeting – January 2023

6:30 pm – Main Presentation

TITLE:  HelioSwarm: A Future NASA Mission to Better Understand Space Plasmas

PRESENTATION:  The vacuum of space is not empty, but is filled with a gas hot enough to rip electrons away from atoms, producing a plasma; a material with charged particles consistently creating and responding to electromagnetic fields driven by collective particle motion. Such plasmas constitute more than 99% of the matter in the visible universe. Understanding how energy is injected into, transported through, and removed from these turbulent plasma systems represents one of the open questions in astrophysics and space science.
HelioSwarm, a mission recently selected by NASA to launch at the end of this decade, will employ a swarm of nine spacecraft, to gather multi-scale measurements and learn more about the dynamics of these systems. In this talk, Prof. Kristopher Klein will discuss what is known and unknown about plasma turbulence and how the HelioSwarm mission will address its unknowns. These forthcoming measurements of near-Earth plasmas, both inside and outside of Earth’s protective magnetic bubble, will finally reveal the physics controlling plasma turbulence both within our solar system and throughout the universe.

BIO:  Prof. Kristopher Klein studies fundamental processes that govern the dynamics of ionized gases in our solar system as well as more distant astrophysical bodies. He has particular interest in how these systems become hot, specifically how energy is transported in chaotic, turbulent flows, attempting to answer these questions with a combination of numerical simulations and spacecraft measurements of the Sun’s extended atmosphere as it collides with the Earth’s magnetic field. He earned his PhD from the University of Iowa in 2013, followed by postdoctoral positions at the University of New Hampshire and the University of Michigan before joining the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory as an Assistant Professor in 2018.

7:30 pm – Second Presentation

TITLE:  Dr. Mary Turners Seasonal Night Sky Presentation