NASA mission awarded largest grant in UI history to launch Tuesday

IOWA CITY — Six years after the University of Iowa landed $115 million from NASA to research how solar wind interacts with the Earth’s magnetic field — marking the largest external funding award in campus history — twin satellites UI researchers built for the mission are set to launch Tuesday.

The Iowa-led $170 million Tandem Reconnection and Cusp Electrodynamics Reconnaissance Satellites mission — or TRACERS — will lift off aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in Santa Barbara County, Calif. between 1:13 and 2:11 p.m. Tuesday.

The university is hosting a “live viewing event” for the launch — which is part of NASA’s long-running Explorers Program — inside the lecture hall named after UI space pioneer James Van Allen, whose Explorer I in 1958 discovered the Earth’s radiation belts and kick-started the long-running Explorers Program supporting the TRACERS mission today.

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‘Monstrous and complex magnetic field’

The mission’s satellites — T1 and T2 — will orbit the Earth’s poles thousands of times over a year before reentering the atmosphere and burning up. They’ll study interactions between the magnetic fields of the sun and Earth to better understand space weather — especially how the sun transfers energy, mass, and momentum to near-Earth space.

“The sun is a big burning ball of plasma, and that plasma is confined by this monstrous and complex magnetic field of the sun,” David Miles, UI associate professor and TRACERS principal investigator, said last week during a news conference on the impending launch — explaining how the sun’s magnetic field interacts with Earth and what the research will investigate.

“There's this cool physics phenomenon called the locked-in condition, which is when — in magnetized plasma — if you move the particles of the plasma, the protons and the electrons, it drags the magnetic field with it,” Miles said. “If you drag the magnetic field, it brings the plasma along with it. So the stuff that is being created off the exhaust of the sun, the solar wind, is this plasma of very ionized gas that is being pushed and dragged and is pushing and dragging the magnetic field of the sun.”

When that magnetized plasma arrives at Earth, it meets a “dominated magnetic region around the Earth, created by the Earth's magnetic field.”

“And the thing that is interacting is the magnetized plasma of the Earth with the magnetized plasma of the solar wind,” Miles said.

Sometimes, the Earth’s magnetic field serves as an obstacle, “the same way that if you have a rock in a stream, the water kind of flows around it.”

Other times, the two systems “couple.”

“And when those systems couple, you dump mass, energy, and momentum into the Earth’s system,” Miles said. “And that's the primary driver for beautiful things … like the Northern Lights. But it also drives some of these negative things that we want to understand and mitigate, like unplanned electrical currents in our electrical grids that can potentially cause accelerated aging in electrical pipelines, disruption of GPS, things like that.”

What TRACERS aims to understand is how the coupling changes in space and time — a mystery research to date hasn’t been able to unravel due to limited satellite technology.

“You fly a satellite through the region where magnetic reconnection is happening … you get one snapshot of what the system looks like,” he said. “The satellite then goes all the way around the Earth, it comes back something like 90 minutes later, and you get another snapshot, and it's different. But you can't tell, is that because the system itself is changing? Is that, because this magnetic reconnection — the coupling process — is moving around? Is it turning on and off?”

Those are fundamental questions scientists need to answer to understand how the solar wind arriving at Earth does or doesn't transfer energy and cause downstream space weather.

“So we have two spacecraft … and they're going to follow each other in very close separation,” he said. “One spacecraft goes through, 10 to 120 seconds later, the second spacecraft comes through. That gives us closely spaced measurements that will allow us to pick apart if some accelerating is going down, if something is moving around, if something is turning on and turning off.

“Each spacecraft is going to get a measurement of the local state of the plasma.”

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‘Career milestone’

Far from the magnetosphere soon to host the TRACERS instruments some 40,000 miles from where they recently sat in a UI lab, the idea for the study began a decade ago over dinner at an American Geophysical Union conference.

UI physicist Craig Kletzing was collaborating with Southwest Research Institute scientist and UI alum Stephen Fuselier at the time on a sounding rocket to investigate magnetic reconnection, and the pair over dinner brainstormed possibly sending two satellites into orbit to build on their work, according to the UI Center for Advancement.

Later landing $1.25 million for an initial pitch to flesh out that mission concept further, Kletzing in 2019 learned the idea had earned NASA backing to become reality — landing $115 million, marking the first of 35,000-plus UI awards to ever top $100 million.

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“This is a career milestone for me personally,” Kletzing said at the time.

Shortly after compiling an “all-star team” of scientists from UI, the Southwest Research Institute, University of California-Berkeley, and UCLA, Kletzing was diagnosed with cancer — decades after overcoming a rare form of hereditary cancer as a child, according to the Center for Advancement.

He died Aug. 10, 2023 — just weeks after NASA officials traveled to Iowa City to confirm the satellites were cleared for launch. Miles took over as principal investigator on the project, still referred to by colleagues as “Craig’s mission,” according to the center.

To cement that further, they attached a pair of purple guitar picks to the main electronics boxes aboard each TRACERS spacecraft set to orbit the Earth on Tuesday.

Vanessa Miller covers higher education for The Gazette.

Comments: (319) 339-3158; vanessa.miller@thegazette.com