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Heliophysics is the study of the Sun, 

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but not just the Sun – the Sun’s influence on everything in the solar system. 

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Interacting with planets, with moons, asteroids, comets 

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– even the spacecraft and people we have in the solar system.

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And the work we do here at Goddard is unique 

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because we have the largest collection of Heliophysicists in the world,

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that cover the gamut of theory and modeling to answer fundamental questions 

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which then drive the development of instruments and missions

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missions and also address something that’s crucial

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to our understanding and our society: space weather.

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Space weather effects can come in many ways, 

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and it can be caused by different things, for example solar flares, 

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which are abrupt eruptions of radiation, or coronal mass ejections — CMEs — 

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which are big explosions of particles that travel several million miles per hour.

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These events also can actually accelerate 

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highly energetic particles to very high velocities.

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It can cause problems in the instrumentation of satellites, 

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problems in communications, GPS signal loss, and even power grid disruptions. 

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We depend too much on this kind of technology and that’s why we have to study 

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and it’s critical for us to study — 

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the near-space environment, the space weather, so we can understand how we can mediate these events.

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Theory and modeling is very important to everything that we do in the Heliophysics science division

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to quantify what measurements are needed to distinguish between competing explanations of an outstanding question.

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It is important to know what to measure, where to measure, and to what accuracy to measure. 

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This is the sort of information that theory and modeling efforts provide. 

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Then armed with that information instruments developers and mission PIs

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can design their instruments and operational approaches to ensure that their missions will be successful. 

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I work with the Community-Coordinated Modeling Center, a multi-partnership agency established in 2000. 

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The core goals are to actually support the research in space weather 

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and also to facilitate the development of next-generation space weather models and tools. 

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. As a part of that, we do a service of monitoring and doing forecasting for NASA missions. 

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And we do this in the way of having an in-house, 

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real-time prototyping of the new tools so we can prepare the models and the tools to operations. 

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In order to understand solar energetic particles, we have to detect them in space. 

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So to detect them, we need to use modern instrumentation 

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— and there are instruments based on modern simulator and modern readout devices. 

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The way that simulators work is that they actually produce a tiny amount of light as the particle traverses through the scintillator. 

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Now the key is to be able to measure that light — that very small amount of light.

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What our lab has actually been doing is taking modern devices — these are silicon photo-multipliers — 

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— and making large area arrays of them — that can replace the bulky photo-multiplier tubes of the past, 

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so we can actually fly this type of miniaturized technology on SmallSats, such as cubesats.

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As a scientist, the dream is to have something really beautiful, 

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really captivating that you can talk to people about, but you can actually get very detailed pieces of scientific information. 

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The aurora is arguably the most visually captivating manifestation of this relationship between the Sun and the Earth. 

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What we do in our lab is we try and actually fly rockets that go through the aurora, 

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and above the aurora, and then come down, in the very short timeframe 

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timeframe so that we can capture the particles that are creating it over here,

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and we can also have the opportunity to look at the light from below.

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And with those instruments, we have two goals. 

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We want to know how many particles did we get, what energies were they at, 

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, and other properties, but these are the most important usually.

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Data drives theory and modeling, which then drives new instrumentation and missions, 

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which ultimately brings us new data and starts that cycle of discovery all over again.

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The work that we do here in Heliophysics is so important, 

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and has many broad implications both for planetary science in our own solar system, 

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and beyond to planets around other stars, so-called exoplanets.

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. By understanding the extreme space weather that these close-in exoplanets are constantly encountering, 

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we can understand whether these planets are in fact habitable,

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and we can derive a better understanding of space weather and its impacts for our own planet and way of life. 

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One exciting aspect of what we do in the Heliophysics Science Division is in fact a fundamental goal of NASA – 

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– to communicate the science and technology which we and our colleagues develop,

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through science communication, science outreach, and science education. 

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And we’re embedded with the largest collection of space and Earth scientists. 

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This allows for a truly cross-disciplinary group that’s not only addressing NASA’s goals in Heliophysics,

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but NASA’s goals across all the science disciplines, 

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and supporting all the missions that NASA and its partners bring to the world.

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