Professor Katherine "Katy" Goodrich
, Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy,
is the Science Operations Center Lead on the NASA TRACERS mission. TRACERS stands
for "Tandem Reconnection and Cusp Electrodynamics Reconnaissance Satellites."
The TRACERS mission will fly in low Earth orbit through the polar cusps, which
are funnel-shaped holes in the magnetic field, to study magnetic reconnection
and its effects on Earth's atmosphere. The objective of the mission is to study
the connection between the Sun and Earth, but specifically the electrically conductive
particles flying off the Sun that interact with the global magnetic field and
enter the Earth's system near the poles — better known as what leads to
the aurora borealis.
Prof. Goodrich's research group in Plasma and Space Physics includes post-doctoral
researcher
Dr. Skylar Shaver
and graduate students
Justin Bowman
,
Dylan Conner, Nilay Ghalsasi and
Rushikesh Patil.
Dr. Shaver and the students contributed greatly to the science and promotion
of the project. “Our job here is to really take those lines and squigglys
that are the data and make it accessible and help people see the bigger picture
of what tracer science is all about,” Dr. Shaver said.
For the next year, data will be collected by the orbiting satellites and gathering data, with updates provided to the public every six months. “Getting all this data back, we have to go through so many different steps, and sometimes we need someone to help us kind of transition through that to make sure that what we get is digestible, the data that we get is calibrated correctly, the data that we get is packaged correctly and distributed and explained correctly to not just the scientific community but to the public because this is a public mission and this is for the public. Everyone should have access to this knowledge that we have,” Dr. Goodrich said.
Follow along on
NASA's TRACERS website for further updates. Thank you to
West Virginia Public Broadcasting and
WBOY-12 for their coverage of the launch.
L-R:
Dylan Conner, Justin Bowman, Prof. Katy Goodrich, Dr. Skylar Shaver, and Nilay
Ghalsasi