research overview
- I study plasma physics of the heliosphere, including the solar wind, planetary magnetospheres, and planetary ionospheres. Topics of particular interest include: high frequency plasma waves, wave-particle interactions, solar wind dynamics, natural micro-meteoroids and human-generated debris impacts on spacecraft, and spacecraft charging. To enable these studies and others, I develop scientific instrumentation for spacecraft, focusing on the measurement of electric and magnetic fields as well as on signal processing techniques and hardware. Past and current instrumentation projects include the Electric Fields and Waves (EFW) instrument on the Van Allen Probes mission (studying Earth's radiation belts), the FIELDS instrument on the Magnetospheric Multiscale mission (MMS) (studying magnetic reconnection), the FIELDS instrument on the Parker Solar Probe mission (studying solar wind heating and acceleration), the RAPS instrument on the COUSIN sounding rocket payload (studying ionosphere-thermosphere coupling), and the AETHER instrument on the Geospace Dynamics Constellation (GDC) (studying ionosphere-thermosphere coupling). Instrumentation projects in development will explore the lightning generated whistler waves in low Earth orbit, the debris environment in low Earth orbit, the plasma environment at the lunar surface, and heating of the thermosphere due to plasma motion.