Fall

Kristopher Klein

Emily Lichko

Assistant Professor Kristopher Klein and Postdoctoral Research Associate Emily Lichko are co-authors on the paper describing the latest science results from the Parker Solar Probe.

On December 14, scientists confirmed that, for the first time in history, a spacecraft touched the Sun. NASA’s Parker Solar Probe flew through the Sun’s upper atmosphere—the corona—and sampled particles and magnetic fields there. As it dipped into and out of the solar corona, the probe confirmed that the outer boundary of the solar atmosphere is 8.1 million miles from the solar surface. The spacecraft also confirmed previous hypotheses that the boundary between the solar atmosphere and solar wind is not a smooth sphere but has spikes and valleys that wrinkle the surface. Discovering where these protrusions line up with solar activity coming from the surface can help scientists learn how events on the Sun affect the atmosphere and solar wind. The probe also discovered that the magnetic zig-zag structures in the solar wind, called switchbacks, originate from the solar surface (photosphere). The patches aligned with magnetic funnels that emerge from the photosphere between convection cell structures called supergranules. In addition to being the birthplace of switchbacks, the magnetic funnels might be where one component of the solar wind originates. The solar wind comes in two different varieties—fast and slow—and the funnels could be where some particles in the fast solar wind come from. Understanding where and how the components of the fast solar wind emerge, and if they’re linked to switchbacks, could help scientists answer a longstanding solar mystery: how the solar corona is heated to millions of degrees, far hotter than the solar surface below.

by Hannah Edwards, Instructional Specialist Coordinator
 

In 1998, the University of Arizona’s Teaching Teams Program was established to create dynamic learning environments for students, teaching assistants, as well as instructors and professors to collaborate in the education of undergraduates. The Teaching Teams Program began promoting peer learning assistants for large General Education science classes, originally in the area of planetary science and astronomy. Our program quickly expanded to become university-wide, including over 200 learning assistants per semester at its peak. Undergraduate students who enrolled in our Teaching Team classes were recruited to take on added responsibility as so-called “preceptors.” Preceptors serve as peer guides, mentors, tutors, and teachers for their fellow classmates.

Dr. Steve Kortenkamp uses preceptors every semester for his planetary science General Education courses. In the Fall 2021 semester, Steve had the help of four preceptors for his PTYS/ASTR 206 course. These preceptors assisted with set-up and management of LPL’s telescopes for a smartphone astrophotography project, held office hours to help students with writing essays, and worked as peer-graders on the submitted essays.

As other departments began following the Teaching Teams model, our curriculum began evolving away from a preceptor training program and into professional development for both preceptors and non-preceptors. Strengthening of interpersonal skills, professional online social media practices, and personal branding preparation for undergraduates is now the core of what Teaching Teams offers to our students.

Teaching Teams workshops provide a format that enables students to experiment with various teaching techniques and communication and internet skills, and outfits them with important interpersonal competencies for a wide variety of careers. Looking towards a globally changing learning and working environment, the overarching goal of the Teaching Teams Program is to instill leadership, teaching, and interpersonal skills as well as personal development for our students to build upon. Using our workshops to reach their desired goals, (i.e., future internships, jobs, graduate schools, etc.), our students will have the knowledge and skills to successfully compete in a changing 21st century world job market.

Today, the Teaching Teams program offers 12 units of course work, enough opportunities to support an undergraduate certificate. The Teaching Teams Program continues to encourage professors to utilize preceptors in conjunction with the program's PTYS 297A and PTYS 397A workshops for the benefit of students.      

 Teaching Teams preceptors helping Dr. K's class with an astrophotography project.

                                                                                                        

Professor Heather Knutson has been named the inaugural speaker for the Adam P. Showman Distinguished Visiting Lectureship. She will spend the week of April 18, 2022, at LPL, giving lectures and meeting with faculty, students, postdoctoral associates, and staff members.

Professor Knutson studies the dynamics and chemistry of extrasolar planetary atmospheres, one of the many fields in which Professor Adam Showman conducted pioneering research. Dr. Knutson led a team that confirmed the predicted eastward shift of the substellar hotspot in the atmosphere of the exoplanet HD 189733b, a shift that Dr. Showman and collaborators had predicted on the basis of fundamental atmospheric dynamical principles. This pioneering discovery established the field of observational exoplanet meteorology. Professor Knutson also searches for long-period companions in exoplanetary systems and conducts precision infrared photometry and time series analysis.

Professor Knutson obtained her B.S. in physics from Johns Hopkins University in 2004 and her Ph.D. in astronomy from Harvard University in 2009. She completed her thesis work, Portraits of Distant Worlds: Characterizing the Atmospheres of Extrasolar Planets, with Professor David Charbonneau. She has been with Caltech since 2011.

 

Rishi Chandra is the recipient of a University Fellows Award, a prestigious fellowship offered only to the University of Arizona's highest-ranked incoming graduate students. The award provides an annual stipend, tuition scholarship, and health coverage, in addition to professional development and networking opportunities.

Rishi graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a B.S. in physics and planetary science. His primary research interests lie in the analysis of solar system materials, including meteorites and returned samples from asteroids and the moon. He also plans to develop cheaply accessible smartphone virtual reality field trips to exotic geologic locales, such as the Antarctic dry valleys and the lunar surface, to inspire the next generation of geoscientists and to engage the public as the scientific community explores these distant frontiers. Aside from his academic interests, Rishi enjoys virtual motorsports, flight simulation, running, and science fiction literature. 

by Rishi Chandra
The University Fellows Award goes to grad students from departments all over campus, and this year's cohort is a tight-knit group. We spent a night at Biosphere 2 for orientation and team-building, which was an unbelievable welcome to Arizona for me in my second week of classes. Through the semester, we have weekly seminars where experts speak with us about practical skills for grad students in any discipline: project management, human-centered design, mentorship and mentee-ship, and more. It's allowed me to connect with students in the humanities, arts, social sciences, and engineering, letting me to explore and present on topics I didn't expect myself to be curious about, such as human-ecosystem coevolution in the Sonoran Desert. It's also given me the opportunity to explore my own interests in new interdisciplinary ways, such as examining ways in which non-Western worldviews can inform Western scientists preparing for human exploration beyond low Earth orbit. Connecting with scholars from other disciplines has offered me new perspectives on familiar problems, so I'm excited to see where the connections I've made with my peers in the UF program lead me in the coming years.

Catalina Sky Survey Tops off 2021 with a Rare Bright Comet Discovery

Gregory Leonard discovered the comet using the Catalina Sky Survey's 1.5-meter (60-inch) telescope on Mount Lemmon. Photo by Camillo Scherer.
 
Every night with clear skies, astronomers with LPL's Catalina Sky Survey (CSS) scan the sky for near-Earth asteroids – space rocks with the potential of venturing close to Earth at some point. During one such routine observation run on Jan. 3, CSS observer Gregory Leonard spotted a fuzzy patch of light tracking across the starfield background in a sequence of four images taken with the 1.5-meter reflector telescope at the summit of Mount Lemmon, Arizona. The dot's fuzzy appearance, combined with the fact that it had a tail, was a dead giveaway that he was looking at a comet. This was the first comet discovered in 2021, and it was thus designated C/2021 A1 (Leonard).

At the time of discovery, the comet was 400,000 times dimmer than what the human eye can see and was detected as a fuzzy patch of pixels tracking across the background stars in four telescope images. In the past, comets were discovered visually by very dedicated astronomers who spent countless hours scanning the night skies with a telescope. In recent decades, most comets are discovered incidentally by surveys tasked with finding near-Earth asteroids like the NASA-funded Catalina Sky Survey (CSS), Pan-STARRS, ATLAS and NEOWISE projects.

Most long-period comets such as Comet Leonard hail from the Oort Cloud, a vast region surrounding our solar system at distances no spacecraft has ever come close to, not even the two Voyager probes, which have officially left the solar system and entered interstellar space. Out there, suspended in the vast interstellar void where temperatures are close to absolute zero, are billions of orbiting comets balanced in a delicate tug-of-war of extremely weak gravitational forces between the distant sun and the rest of the Milky Way. Slight perturbations of this precarious balance of forces may nudge a chunk of ice and dust out of the Oort Cloud and send it onto a trajectory toward the Sun.

Comets are small bodies of the Solar System which are largely comprised of different types of ices and dust. Most comets have undergone very little processing since the beginning of the Solar System since they spend most of their lifetime at large heliocentric distances in the most frigid regions of space. Cometary nuclei therefore contain pristine samples of grains and gas from the protosolar nebula in which they formed; thus studying comets allows us to peek into the early conditions of our Solar System’s formation.

The most abundant ice and contributor to cometary activity through sublimation is water-ice, but C/2021 A1 (Leonard) was observed to be active beyond the water-ice sublimation zone. This means that other mechanisms different from water-ice sublimation were responsible for the activity, possibly through the sublimation of other icy compounds such as carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, or different exothermic mechanisms.

Comet Leonard made its closest approach to Earth on Dec. 12, at which point it was still more than 21 million miles away. "This is the last time we are going to see the comet," Leonard says. "It's speeding along at escape velocity, 44 miles per second. After its slingshot around the Sun, it will be ejected from our solar system, and it may stumble into another star system millions of years from now."

Read more:

https://catalina.lpl.arizona.edu/news/2021/12/catalina-sky-survey-tops-2021-rare-bright-comet-discovery

https://news.arizona.edu/story/heres-how-see-comet-leonard-according-uarizona-researcher-who-discovered-it

Dr. Daniella DellaGiustina will join LPL as an Assistant Professor this January (2022).

Dani is Deputy Principal Investigator for the OSIRIS-REx mission, responsible for oversight of extended mission activities. Previous to being named Deputy PI, Dani served as the mission’s Image Processing Lead Scientist. Dani is an alumna of the University of Arizona, where she earned a B.S. in Physics and Ph.D. in Geosciences. She also holds an M.S. in Computational Physics from the University of Alaska. As an undergraduate at UArizona, Dani minored in planetary sciences at LPL and was an Arizona NASA Space Grant intern. Her Space Grant project on characterizing mineral phases in meteorites was supervised by Dante Lauretta, now Principal Investigator for OSIRIS-REx. Dani continued to work at LPL with Dante Lauretta and Michael Drake, leading a student experiment on the Phase A Discovery OSIRIS Mission until the end of her undergraduate career. In graduate school, she fused remotely-sensed observations of Earth’s cryosphere with the numerical modeling techniques to understand the dynamics of the Greenland ice sheet. Her Ph.D. dissertation was on the subject of Signal Processing of Seismic and Image Data for Planetary Exploration. In her spare time, Dani is an avid rock-climber and outdoor enthusiast.

In this Sci&Tell interview, Regents Professor and OSIRIS-REx Principal Investigator Dante Lauretta discusses the patience required when working in science and how his passion for science stems from his love for exploring. 

 

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