Liz MacDonald | |
|---|---|
 MacDonald discussing the STEVE aurora in 2018 | |
| Alma mater | University of New Hampshire University of Washington |
| Known for | Aurorasaurus |
| Scientific career | |
| Institutions | Los Alamos National Laboratory Goddard Space Flight Center |
Elizabeth MacDonald is a space weather scientist who works at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. She is a co-investigator on the Helium, Oxygen, Proton, and Electron Spectrometer on the NASA Radiation Belts Storm Probe mission.
Elizabeth MacDonald was born in Walla Walla, Washington, to Bill and Alice MacDonald. [1] MacDonald received a BSc in physics from the University of Washington, funded by a NASA Space Grant scholarship, in 1999. [2] Her mentor, Ruth Skoug, encouraged her to remain in research. [3] MacDonald completed her postgraduate studies at the University of New Hampshire, earning her PhD in physics in 2004. [4]
MacDonald specializes in plasma mass spectrometry, and has expertise in instrument development and data analysis and interpretation.
After completing her PhD, MacDonald joined Los Alamos National Laboratory. At LANL she was the principal investigator for the Z-Plasma Spectrometer on the Department of Energy Space and Atmospheric Burst Reporting System geosynchronous payload. [5] She also led the Innovative Research and Integrated Sensing team. [6] She was principal investigator for the Advanced Miniaturized Plasma Spectrometer. [7] She received the Los Alamos Awards Program recognition three times. [8]
Between 2009 and 2011 she led the Department of Energy funded Modular Advanced Space Environment Instrumentation. [2] In 2012 she became a New Mexico Consortium-affiliated researcher, working on the prototype for the Aurorasaurus citizen science project. [9] She has served on scientific review panels for the National Science Foundation and Los Alamos National Laboratory grants. [10] Today MacDonald works in the Goddard Space Flight Center. [11]
In 2018 MacDonald and her team announced the discovery of a new aurora called Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement (STEVE). [12] STEVE is farther from the poles than the aurora is typically seen. [13] The European Space Agency Swam A satellite was used to identify that the charged particles in STEVE were around 6000 °C. [12] It was observed by Canadian aurora enthusiasts in 2015. [14] [15] MacDonald attributes the faint purple glow to a subauroral ion drift. [16] [17] MacDonald published the finding in Science Advances . [18] She is working with NASA to crowd source sightings of STEVE. [19]
In 2018, MacDonald was named as a Walla Walla Public Schools Graduate of Distinction as a "pioneer in citizen science initiatives and mentor for aspiring scientists of all ages". [20]
In 2016 in the journal Space Weather, MacDonald and co-workers reported that "citizen scientists are regularly able to spot auroras farther south of an area where prediction models indicated". [21] [22] [23] MacDonald leads an interdisciplinary citizen science project called Aurorasaurus, which uses social media to predict the Northern Lights during the current solar maximum. [24] [25] [26] To fund the program, she won a $1-million INSPIRE grant from the National Science Foundation together with Andrea Tapia of Pennsylvania State University and Michelle Hall of Science Education Solutions. [27] [8] [28] [29]
After noticing a spike in tweets about an aurora borealis in October 2011, she established Aurorasaurus to track such geolocation information in order to improve forecasting, such as that done by NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center. [30] [31] [32]
In August 2017, she spoke at the Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site about the 2017 solar eclipse. [33] MacDonald regularly speaks to high school students and community groups. [34] [35]
Los Alamos National Laboratory is one of the sixteen research and development laboratories of the United States Department of Energy (DOE), located a short distance northwest of Santa Fe, New Mexico, in the American southwest. Best known for its central role in helping develop the first atomic bomb, LANL is one of the world's largest and most advanced scientific institutions.
Steven Weldon Squyres is an American geologist and planetary scientist. He was the James A. Weeks Professor of Physical Sciences at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. His research area is in planetary sciences, with a focus on large solid bodies in the Solar System such as the terrestrial planets and the moons of the Jovian planets. Squyres was the principal investigator of the Mars Exploration Rover Mission (MER).
The International Cometary Explorer (ICE) spacecraft, designed and launched as the International Sun-Earth Explorer-3 (ISEE-3) satellite, was launched on 12 August 1978 into a heliocentric orbit. It was one of three spacecraft, along with the mother/daughter pair of ISEE-1 and ISEE-2, built for the International Sun-Earth Explorer (ISEE) program, a joint effort by NASA and ESRO/ESA to study the interaction between the Earth's magnetic field and the solar wind.
The Russian Space Research Institute is the leading organization of the Russian Academy of Sciences on space exploration to benefit fundamental science. It was formerly known as the Space Research Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences. It is usually known by the shorter name Space Research Institute and especially by the initialism IKI.
Venera-D is a proposed Russian space mission to Venus that would include an orbiter and a lander to be launched in 2031. The orbiter's prime objective is to perform observations with the use of a radar. The lander, based on the Venera design, would be capable of operating for a long duration on the planet's surface. The "D" in Venera-D stands for "dolgozhivuschaya," which means "long lasting" in Russian.
The Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) Mission is a NASA robotic space mission to study the Earth's magnetosphere, using four identical spacecraft flying in a tetrahedral formation. The spacecraft were launched on 13 March 2015 at 02:44 UTC. The mission is designed to gather information about the microphysics of magnetic reconnection, energetic particle acceleration, and turbulence — processes that occur in many astrophysical plasmas. As of March 2020, the MMS spacecraft has enough fuel to remain operational until 2040.
RAX-2 is a CubeSat satellite built as a collaboration between SRI International and students at the University of Michigan College of Engineering. It is the second spacecraft in the RAX mission. The RAX-1 mission ended after approximately two months of operation due to a gradual degradation of the solar panels that ultimately resulted in a loss of power. RAX team members applied the lessons learned from RAX-1 to the design of a second flight unit, RAX-2, which performs the same mission concept of RAX-1 with improved bus performance and additional operational modes. Science measurements are enhanced through interactive experiments with high power ionospheric heaters where FAI will be generated on demand.
Madhulika (Lika) Guhathakurta is an Indian-American astrophysicist and scientist with NASA's Heliophysics Science Division. She was the lead program scientist for NASA's Living With a Star initiative and serves as program scientist on the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), Van Allen Probes, and Solar TErrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) missions. Lika was previously the program scientist on SPARTAN-201, a free-flying science instrument platform designed to study velocity and acceleration of the solar wind and observe the Sun's corona. These missions were conducted as part of the larger STS-56, STS-69, STS-77, STS-87, and STS-95 mission objectives. She has worked as an educator, scientist, mission designer, directed and managed science programs, and has built instruments for spacecraft. Dr. Guhathakurta is known for her work in heliophysics where she has authored over 100 publications on the subject. She served as the NASA Lead Scientist for the North American Solar eclipse of August 21, 2017.
Yajaira Sierra-Sastre is a Puerto Rican materials scientist, educator, and aspiring astronaut. She was part of a six-person crew, and the only Hispanic, selected to participate in a four-month-long, Mars analog mission funded by NASA. Sierra-Sastre aspires to become the first Puerto Rican woman to travel to outer space.
David John McComas is an American space physicist, Professor of Astrophysical Sciences, and leads the Space Physics at Princeton Group at Princeton University. He was the Princeton University Vice President for the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab (PPPL) from 2016 - 2024 and previously Assistant Vice President for Space Science and Engineering at the Southwest Research Institute, Adjoint Professor of Physics at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA), and was the founding director of the Center for Space Science and Exploration at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He is noted for his extensive accomplishments in experimental space plasma physics, including leading instruments and missions to study the heliosphere and solar wind: IMAP, IBEX, TWINS, Ulysses/SWOOPS, ACE/SWEPAM, and Parker Solar Probe. He received the National Academy of Science's 2023 Arctowski Medal, European Geosciences Union 2022 Hannes Alfven Medal, SCOSTEP 2022 Distinguished Scientist Award, a NASA Exceptional Public Service Medal in 2015, the 2014 COSPAR Space Science Award, and the American Geophysical Union 1993 Macelwane Medal.
Jovian Auroral Distributions Experiment (JADE) is an instrument that detects and measures ions and electrons around the spacecraft. It is a suite of detectors on the Juno Jupiter orbiter. JADE includes JADE-E, JADE-I, and the EBox. JADE-E and JADE-I are sensors that are spread out on the spacecraft, and the EBox is located inside the Juno Radiation Vault. EBox stands for Electronics Box. JADE-E is for detecting electrons from 0.1 to 100 keV, and there are three JADE-E sensors on Juno. JADE-I is for detecting ions from 5 eV to 50 keV. It is designed to return data in situ on Jupiter's auroral region and magnetospheric plasmas, by observing electrons and ions in this region. It is primarily focused on Jupiter, but it was turned on in January 2016 while still en route to study inter-planetary space.
STEVE is an atmospheric optical phenomenon that appears as a purple and green light ribbon in the night sky, named in late 2016 by aurora watchers from Alberta, Canada. According to analysis of satellite data from the European Space Agency's Swarm mission, the phenomenon is caused by a 25 km (16 mi) wide ribbon of hot plasma at an altitude of 450 km (280 mi), with a temperature of 3,000 °C and flowing at a speed of 6 km/s (3.7 mi/s). The phenomenon is not rare, but had not been investigated and described scientifically prior to that time.
Aurorasaurus is a citizen science project which tracks auroras through crowdsourced observations from a mobile app and social media, namely Twitter and Facebook.
Emma J. Bunce is a British space physicist and Professor of Planetary Plasma Physics at the University of Leicester. She holds a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award. Her research is on the magnetospheres of Saturn and Jupiter. She is principal investigator (PI) of the MIXS instrument on BepiColombo, was deputy lead on the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer proposal, and co-investigator on the Cassini–Huygens mission.
Karissa Y. Sanbonmatsu is an American structural biologist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. She works on the mechanism of non-coding RNA complexes including the ribosome, riboswitches, long non-coding RNAs, as well as chromatin. She was the first to perform an atomistic simulation of the ribosome, determine the secondary structure of an intact lncRNA and to publish a one billion atom simulation of a biomolecular complex.
A subauroral ion drift (SAID), also known as a polarisation jet, is an atmospheric phenomenon driven by substorms in the Earth's magnetosphere. First discovered in 1971, a SAID is a latitudinally narrow layer of rapid, westward flowing ions in the Earth’s ionosphere. Though not traditionally associated with an optical emission, the STEVE discovery paper suggested the first link between this optical emission’s occurrence and that of an extremely fast and hot SAID event.
Jane Elizabeth (Beth) Nordholt is an American physicist known for her work in space science on mass spectrometry of the solar wind and rings of Saturn and the flow of water vapor in the Earth's polar wind, and for her work in digital security on devices for quantum key distribution and random number generation. Until her retirement, she worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory, which in 2006 named her as a Laboratory Fellow.
The Solar-Terrestrial Observer for the Response of the Magnetosphere (STORM) was one of five mission proposals selected to proceed to Phase A concept studies as part of the 2019 NASA Heliophysics Medium Class Explorer Announcement of Opportunity. STORM will provide the first-ever global view of the Sun-Earth system. STORM takes simultaneous observations of the solar wind and the response of Earth’s magnetosphere, including the magnetopause, auroral oval, and ring current dynamics, using global multi-spectral and neutral atom imaging to quantify the global circulation of the energy that powers space weather.
Michelle F. Thomsen is space physicist known for her research on the magnetospheres of Earth, Jupiter, and Saturn.
Vania Koleva Jordanova is a physicist known for her work on space weather and geomagnetic storms. She was elected a fellow of the American Geophysical Union in 2021.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Academics | |
