Physics Department receives three grants for research in space science.

Augsburg College has received funding from the National Science Foundation and NASA for three multi-year research projects, each of which will provide funds for undergraduate research by Augsburg students.

a. The National Science Foundation’s Magnetospheric Physics Program awarded Augsburg a five-year $ 600,000 grant to continue the Magnetometer Array for Cusp and Cleft Studies (MACCS) project, which uses an array of nine ground-based magnetometers located at Inuit villages in Arctic Canada to study high-latitude ionospheric and magnetospheric processes governed by the interaction of the solar wind with Earth’s space environment. MACCS, begun by Augsburg and Boston University in 1991, has provided undergraduate research opportunities for over a dozen Augsburg students; many have gone on to earn advanced degrees in physics, astronomy, or related engineering fields. One of these, 1992 Augsburg graduate and former student body president David Murr, who received his Ph. D. degree from Boston University in 2002 for his work on MACCS, received the first Geospace Environment Modeling (GEM) Postdoctoral Fellowship awarded by NSF, and is now a postdoctoral researcher at Dartmouth College. This grant will support research efforts by Physics Professor Mark Engebretson, Assistant Scientist Jennifer Posch, and two students, and will also support continued visits to Augsburg by Dr. Viatcheslav Pilipenko, a theoretical physicist from Russia. “Slava” Pilipenko is now head of laboratories at two Moscow institutions, the Institute of the Physics of the Earth and the prestigious Space Research Institute.

This grant also provides funds to allow data from two of the nine MACCS stations to be sent in near real time via the Iridium satellite telephone system to computers in Augsburg College’s Computer Science Department, from where they will be made available automatically on the worldwide web for use by other scientists.

b. The National Science Foundation’s Office of Polar Programs awarded Augsburg a three-year, $ 426,000 grant to continue another ground-based observational space physics program at Augsburg, involving magnetometers at South Pole Station, Antarctica, and other sites in Antarctica, Greenland, and Arctic Canada. Mark Engebretson and nearly 20 Augsburg physics students have been funded to work with these instruments over the past 21 years. This new grant also supports Jennifer Posch and a student; a substantial fraction supports Dr. Marc Lessard of Dartmouth College’s Thayer School of Engineering and a graduate student there.

3. NASA’s Office of Space Science awarded Princeton University’s Plasma Physics Laboratory and Augsburg a three-year $ 252,000 grant for a new project to use observations of magnetic fields and energetic particles from NASA’s Polar satellite to better characterize the onset of magnetospheric substorms, which lead to the sudden onset of auroral displays. Physics Professor Ken Erickson heads up Augsburg’s efforts in this project; which will also involve an undergraduate student researcher.