Lindsay Glesener | |
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 Glesener and rocket | |
| Alma mater | San Francisco State University University of California, Berkeley |
| Scientific career | |
| Institutions | University of Minnesota |
| Thesis | Faint Coronal Hard X-rays From Accelerated Electrons in Solar Flares (2012) |
Lindsay Erin Glesener is a professor in the Institute for Astrophysics at the University of Minnesota . She is a National Science Foundation CAREER Award researcher and lead investigator on the FOXSI Sounding Rocket.
Glesener grew up near Lake Superior. [1] After Glesener graduated from high school she worked briefly as a ballet dancer. [2] Glesener completed her bachelor's degree at San Francisco State University, graduating in 2006. [3] She joined the University of California, Berkeley for her graduate studies, earning a Masters in 2009 and a PhD in 2012. Her thesis, Faint Coronal Hard X-rays From Accelerated Electrons in Solar Flares, was supervised by Robert Lin and Säm Krucker. [4] [5] Whilst a PhD student she wrote for the Berkeley Science Review. [6] For her thesis she was awarded the Tomkins Instrumentation Thesis Prize from the Royal Astronomical Society. [7] Her graduate work focussed on building a payload known as the FOXSI Sounding Rocket. [8]
She worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley for two years before joining the University of Minnesota in 2014. [2] She was promoted to assistant professor in 2015. [3] She was awarded a National Science Foundation grant to expand the School of Physics and Astronomy of the University of Minnesota. [9]
Glesener is the PI of the FOXSI Sounding Rocket. [10] [11] FOXSI detects Hard X-rays which are a signature of extraordinarily hot solar material. [12] The rocket payload flew in 2014, using a Solar Aspect and Alignment System and Hard X-rays Spectroscopy to obtain focussed images of the sun. [13] She also works on small CubeSats. [1] [10] In 2017 Glesener identified that nanoflares (small explosions) in the plasma of the sun may cause the scalding temperatures in the solar corona. [14]
In 2018 she was awarded an NSF Career Award, allowing her to link high-energy solar and astrophysics. [15] [16] FOXSI 3 launched on August 21, 2018. [17] Glesener wants to identify how particles are accelerated in the most high-energy events that occur in the sun, including explosions, flares and plasma ejections. [18]
Glesener has given invited talks at academic conferences and colleges. [19] [20] [21] [22] [23] She is on the Solar Physics Division committee of the American Astronomical Society. [24]
Loren Wilber Acton is an American physicist who flew on Space Shuttle mission STS-51-F as a Payload Specialist for the Lockheed Palo Alto Research Laboratory. He is also the father of Cheryll Glotfelty, a leading ecocritic.
Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager was a NASA solar flare observatory. It was the sixth mission in the Small Explorer program (SMEX), selected in October 1997 and launched on 5 February 2002, at 20:58:12 UTC. Its primary mission was to explore the physics of particle acceleration and energy release in solar flares.
Eugene Newman Parker was an American solar and plasma physicist. In the 1950s he proposed the existence of the solar wind and that the magnetic field in the outer Solar System would be in the shape of a Parker spiral, predictions that were later confirmed by spacecraft measurements. In 1987, Parker proposed the existence of nanoflares, a leading candidate to explain the coronal heating problem.
Solar physics is the branch of astrophysics that specializes in the study of the Sun. It deals with detailed measurements that are possible only for our closest star. It intersects with many disciplines of pure physics, astrophysics, and computer science, including fluid dynamics, plasma physics including magnetohydrodynamics, seismology, particle physics, atomic physics, nuclear physics, stellar evolution, space physics, spectroscopy, radiative transfer, applied optics, signal processing, computer vision, computational physics, stellar physics and solar astronomy.
Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS), also called Explorer 94 and SMEX-12, is a NASA solar observation satellite. The mission was funded through the Small Explorer program to investigate the physical conditions of the solar limb, particularly the interface region made up of the chromosphere and transition region. The spacecraft consists of a satellite bus and spectrometer built by the Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory (LMSAL), and a telescope provided by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO). IRIS is operated by LMSAL and NASA's Ames Research Center.
A nanoflare is a very small episodic heating event which happens in the corona, the external atmosphere of the Sun.
Kenneth John Frost was a pioneer in the early space program, designing and flying instruments to detect and measure X-rays and gamma-rays in space, primarily from the Sun. He was the first to suggest the use of an active scintillation shield operated in electronic anticoincidence with the primary detector to reduce the background from cosmic ray interactions, an innovation that made sensitive hard X-ray and gamma-ray astronomy possible. He was an American astrophysicist at Goddard Space Flight Center working as a civil servant for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. During his career, he was the project scientist of the Solar Maximum Mission, principal investigator of six science instruments, the head of the Solar Physics Branch, and the associate director of Space Sciences.
Joan T. Schmelz is the Associate Director for Science and Public Outreach at the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) for the Universities Space Research Association (USRA). Previously, Schmelz was the Deputy Director of Arecibo Observatory and the Director of USRA Operations at Arecibo from 2015 through 2018. Before joining USRA, Schmelz was an NSF Program Director in the Astronomical Sciences Division, where she oversaw the Astronomy & Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship program, and a professor of physics at the University of Memphis from 1996 to 2017. Schmelz's research focus is heliophysics, specifically investigating the coronal heating problem as well as the properties and dynamics of the solar atmosphere. She uses spectroscopic and image data in the X-ray and ultraviolet wavelength ranges obtained from NASA satellites and rockets. She has published over 80 refereed scientific journal articles and authored three books.
Katharine Reeves is an astronomer and solar physicist who works at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA).. She is known for her work on high temperature plasmas in the solar corona, and measurement/analysis techniques to probe the physics of magnetic reconnection and thermal energy transport during solar flares; these are aspects of the coronal heating problem that organizes a large part of the field. She has a strong scientific role in multiple NASA and international space missions to observe the Sun: Hinode ; IRIS ; SDO; Parker Solar Probe; and suborbital sounding rockets including the MaGIXS and Hi-C FLARE high-resolution spectral imaging packages.
Vassiliki Kalogera is a Greek astrophysicist. She is a professor at Northwestern University and the Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA). She is a leading member of the LIGO Collaboration that observed gravitational waves in 2015.
The Miniature X-ray Solar Spectrometer (MinXSS) CubeSat was the first launched National Aeronautics and Space Administration Science Mission Directorate CubeSat with a science mission. It was designed, built, and operated primarily by students at the University of Colorado Boulder with professional mentorship and involvement from professors, scientists, and engineers in the Aerospace Engineering Sciences department and the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, as well as Southwest Research Institute, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research's High Altitude Observatory. The mission principal investigator is Dr. Thomas N. Woods and co-investigators are Dr. Amir Caspi, Dr. Phil Chamberlin, Dr. Andrew Jones, Rick Kohnert, Professor Xinlin Li, Professor Scott Palo, and Dr. Stanley Solomon. The student lead was Dr. James Paul Mason, who has since become a Co-I for the second flight model of MinXSS.
Arnold O. Benz is a professor emeritus at the Institute for Particle Physics and Astrophysics in the Physics Department of ETH Zurich.
Lyndsay Fletcher is a Scottish astrophysicist at the University of Glasgow who specialises in solar flares.
Janet G. Luhmann is an American physicist and senior fellow of the Space Sciences Laboratory of the University of California, Berkeley. She has made major contributions to a wide range of topics in planetary, solar, magnetospheric, and heliospheric physics. She is the principal investigator of the IMPACT instrument suite on the twin-spacecraft STEREO mission. IMPACT stands for In-situ Measurements of Particles and Coronal mass ejection (CME) Transients. It consists of a, "suite of seven instruments that samples the 3-D distribution of solar wind plasma electrons, the characteristics of the solar energetic particle (SEP) ions and electrons, and the local vector magnetic field."
Solar radio emission refers to radio waves that are naturally produced by the Sun, primarily from the lower and upper layers of the atmosphere called the chromosphere and corona, respectively. The Sun produces radio emissions through four known mechanisms, each of which operates primarily by converting the energy of moving electrons into electromagnetic radiation. The four emission mechanisms are thermal bremsstrahlung (braking) emission, gyromagnetic emission, plasma emission, and electron-cyclotron maser emission. The first two are incoherent mechanisms, which means that they are the summation of radiation generated independently by many individual particles. These mechanisms are primarily responsible for the persistent "background" emissions that slowly vary as structures in the atmosphere evolve. The latter two processes are coherent mechanisms, which refers to special cases where radiation is efficiently produced at a particular set of frequencies. Coherent mechanisms can produce much larger brightness temperatures (intensities) and are primarily responsible for the intense spikes of radiation called solar radio bursts, which are byproducts of the same processes that lead to other forms of solar activity like solar flares and coronal mass ejections.
Petr Heinzel is a Czech astronomer and professor who is specialized in Solar Physics. From 2004 to 2012 he was director of the Astronomical Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences. In 2012 he was appointed Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Charles University, Czech Republic. Since, 2017, he is chair of the Czech Astronomical Society. He is also a member of the International Astronomical Union.
Kelly Korreck is an American space scientist. She is currently an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian and Program Scientist at NASA as head of operations for the Solar Wind Electrons Alphas and Protons (SWEAP) instrument aboard the Parker Solar Probe spacecraft.
Manuela Temmer is Associate Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Graz, Austria and Head of the Heliospheric Physics Research Group. She is an expert in the science underpinning space weather forecasting.
Gordon Dean Holman is an emeritus research astrophysicist at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA’s) Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. His research mostly focused on obtaining an understanding of high-energy radiation from astronomical objects. This radiation cannot be observed from Earth’s surface, but is observed with instruments on satellites launched to orbits above Earth’s atmosphere. It is primarily emitted by high-energy electrons interacting with ions. These electrons also emit radiation at radio frequencies which is observed from Earth’s surface. Consequently, these observations from space and radio telescopes provide a view of hot gas and energetic particles in the Universe that could not otherwise be obtained. Holman has specialized in the interpretation of these observed emissions to determine the origin and evolution of this hot gas and energetic particles. He has been described as "not just a theorist, he also looks at the data".
| Authority control: Academics |
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