UI scientists carry on legacy of space pioneer James Van Allen

IOWA CITY - The University of Iowa is among only a few universities that continue to build instruments and hardware for space flights.

Craig Kletzing, UI professor of physics and astronomy, ticks off a list of schools you can count on two hands.

“It's not a super common thing to see,” said Kletzing, who has instruments going into space on two NASA projects in 2012 and 2014. “It's a fairly specialized kind of thing, and you need the right kind of infrastructure and experience. It's one thing the UI has made a priority.”

Various NASA projects with UI-built instruments are scheduled for space launches this year and in 2012 and 2014, and other UI data-gathering projects - where UI researchers didn't build the hardware, but they contribute to the data analysis - continue aboard missions like the international space station and a satellite circling Saturn.

“That's part of the legacy of Van Allen,” Mary Hall Reno, head of UI physics and astronomy, said, referencing noted UI space research pioneer, the late James Van Allen. “It was part of our strategy going forward. We wouldn't be doing things exactly as Van Allen did them, but we would continue his legacy in building instruments for space-based projects.”

Space physics is one of many research areas for the physics and astronomy department, which has 29 faculty members and 37 scientific staff.

Faculty and research scientists also study plasma physics, high energy physics, nuclear and particle physics, condensed matter and material physics and numerous topics in interdisciplinary fields, such as quantum electronics. The department has researchers working on experiments at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, for example.

But space physics remains a large and notable focus. Of the $21 million in external research funding the department received in 2009-2010, two-thirds was for space physics projects, Reno said.

Kletzing heads up a $30 million NASA project to study how various amounts of space radiation form and change during space storms. The mission, Radiation Belt Storm Probes, will launch two identical satellites in May 2012.

The UI built two identical electromagnetic instrument suites for the satellites. The UI portion is part of the five-instrument suite selected by NASA for the mission. The UI is the lead institution in the three-group collaboration, along with the University of New Hampshire and Goddard Space Flight Center.

The UI-built instruments are being tested at the Applied Physics Lab at Johns Hopkins University, before they are added to the spacecraft, also built at the APL. The two satellites will have slightly different orbits so they lap each other over time, like two runners on a track, Kletzing said.

The project will be the most complete set of modern instruments ever flown in the Van Allen radiation belts, Kletzing said.

In 1958, the first U.S. satellite, Explorer 1, carried a Geiger counter designed and built by Van Allen, a world-renowned space scientist and longtime UI professor. That ultimately led to the discovery of the Van Allen radiation belts that circle the Earth. Van Allen retired from the UI in 1985, but kept working and researching until his death in August 2006 at the age of 91.

Kletzing said even though the Van Allen belts were discovered more than 50 years ago, there is still a lot scientists don't know about them.

“This is a completely new thing never done with the radiation belts before,” he said of the mission. “But it's neat to have the connection all the way back to the beginning of the Space Age through Van Allen.”

Kletzing also is working on the Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission, a solar terrestrial probe with four identical spacecraft scheduled to launch in 2014. The UI is building one part, the electronic optics, for one instrument, the electron drift instrument, to measure electric fields using a weak electron beam.

The next space launch to involve UI-built instruments will happen in August, with NASA's JUNO project. JUNO, which will orbit Jupiter, is a $100 million project that involves several universities and researchers, a NASA spokesman said.

Bill Kurth, UI research scientist in space physics, worked on both the Radiation Belt Storm Probes with Kletzing and also is involved with JUNO, which will have a five-year cruise before it reaches Jupiter.

When JUNO arrives in late 2016, it will go into polar orbit of Jupiter and circle the planet 30 times to collect data, Kurth said. The primary purpose is to study the origin of Jupiter by better understanding its interior, he said.

But the UI-built portion, one instrument that is part of a larger payload on the spacecraft, will study something else - the polar magnetosphere of Jupiter, for the first time ever, Kurth said.

The imminent end of NASA's space shuttle program shouldn't affect UI projects, several researchers said, because it's been many years since the university has been involved with shuttle missions.

Talk at the federal level of NASA budget cuts, however, could affect future UI involvement, they said. Universities compete to provide instruments and participate in research for NASA missions. Budget cuts to NASA could mean fewer projects for which to compete.

“We're actively looking at possibilities for beginning work on other space projects,” Kurth said. “But the NASA budget determines how many prospects there are for things we'd be interested in working on.”