02/18/2022
By Joanne Gagnon-Ketchen

Physics colloquium will held on Wednesday, Feb. 23, 2022 from 4 to 5 p.m.
The colloquium will be virtual. Location: Contact Joanne Gagnon-Ketchen for Zoom link

Speaker: Madhulika Guhathakurta, Senior Advisor for New Initiatives, Heliophysics, NASA GSFC/Program Scientist, NASA HQ
Title: "Explorations of Solar Activity and the Heliophysical Environment"

Abstract: As human activity expands into the solar system, the need for accurate space weather and space climate forecasting is expanding, too. Space probes are now orbiting or en route for flybys of Mercury, Venus, Earth and the Moon, Mars, Vesta, Ceres, Saturn, and Pluto. Agencies around the world are preparing to send robotic spacecraft into interplanetary space. Each of these missions (plus others on the drawing board) has a unique need to know when a solar storm will pass through its corner of space or how the subsequent solar cycle will behave. Ultimately, astronauts will follow, traveling beyond Earth orbit, and their need for interplanetary space weather and climate forecasting will be even more compelling. Until recently, forecasters could scarcely predict space weather in the limited vicinity of Earth. Interplanetary forecasting was even more challenging. This began to change in 2006 with the launch of the twin STEREO probes followed almost four years later by the Solar Dynamics Observatory. These three spacecrafts along with SOHO now surround the sun, monitoring active regions, flares, and coronal mass ejections around the full circumference of the star. No matter which way a solar storm travels, the STEREO-SOHO-SDO fleet can track it. Missions like SDO and Kepler are giving us a better view of sun-like stars and their inner workings to understand their cyclic behavior, while missions like MAVEN and JUNO are investigating interaction of solar radiation and solar wind with Mar’s upper atmosphere and Jupiter’s intense auroras, a branch of heliophysics called “comparative heliophysics”. To capitalize on the science that will naturally emerge from the growth and modernization of the observational assets, researchers from many different fields will have to work together. Interplanetary space weather and climate forecasting is essentially interdisciplinary. Progress requires expertise in plasma physics, solar physics, weather forecasting, planetary atmospheres, and more. In the past, NASA has assembled such teams under the umbrella of virtual institutes, where widely dispersed researchers confer from a distance using the Internet and other forms of tele-collaboration. Interplanetary space weather might call for a similar approach. One thing is sure: The Sun is not waiting, and the stakes are as big as the solar system itself.

Bio: For the past two decades, Guhathakurta has enabled the development of Heliophysics as an integrated scientific discipline from which fundamental discoveries about our universe provide direct societal benefits. As the Lead for the Living With a Star (LWS) program for 16 years since its initiation in 2000 she made possible the flagship missions (e.g. the Solar Dynamics Observatory, Van Allen Probes, Solar Orbiter Collaboration with European Space Agency and Parker Solar Probe), many other missions, including STEREO that would revolutionize our understanding of how the Sun shapes space weather in the solar system. To accelerate innovation and scientific discovery she created funding mechanisms to shepherd traditional domain scientists out of their comfort zones to create LWS system science known as the Targeted Research & Technology program and Focused Science Teams that foster competitive, yet collaborative environments that promote the crosspollination of science ideas and technology. To nurture the next generation of leaders in Heliophysics, she created the Jack Eddy Fellowship Program which has become an important channel for the professional growth of promising researchers. Since 2017, she has championed the growth of FDL, both in terms of the breadth of problem areas tackled as well as in the number of agency and industry partners. The types of innovative solutions include virtual telescopes, data fusion, edge computing, and autonomy and this approach will have an enduring imprint on the way science and exploration is carried out by future generations. Presently she is back at NASA HQ where she is a program scientist and splitting her time as a Senior Advisor for New Initiatives at the Heliophysics Division, GSFC.