By Katie Bahr
Doctoral student Amy Soto, who studies in Catholic University’s Department of Physics, has always loved looking up at the stars. When she was growing up in Hartford, Conn., she spent family vacations visiting the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. In 1993, she witnessed a shuttle launch at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., with her family.
“I remember thinking how cool it would be to go into outer space,” Soto said. “And who doesn’t love looking up at the sky and gazing at the stars and wondering what’s out there?”
So in May 2014, Soto jumped at the opportunity to do research work at the Nordic Optical Telescope in the Canary Islands of Spain. The telescope is at Roque de los Muchachos Observatory in La Palma, one of the best locations for optical and infared astronomy in the Northern Hemisphere.
“The observing I did in the Canary Islands, it was so amazing,” Soto said. “Going out there, it was the darkest place I had ever been in my whole life and you can see the bands of the Milky Way across the sky at night.”
Soto’s trip would never have been possible without the connections she has made at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., where she works five days a week as part of her doctoral research.
At NASA Goddard, Soto studies galaxy evolution alongside world-class astrophysicists, including her advisor, Duilia de Mello, a Brazilian astronomer who researched in Chile and Sweden before coming to NASA Goddard in 2003. An associate professor of physics, de Mello has been at CUA since 2008.
“By being at Goddard, you have this direct connection to the scientists — most of whom are the leading scientists in their area. It’s really an environment that fosters learning,” said Soto.
Soto is one of many CUA students currently doing research at NASA Goddard. The student involvement is reflective of a long partnership between NASA and Catholic University, which traces back two decades to the formation of the University’s Institute for Astrophysics and Computational Science (IACS) in 1996.
IACS was founded by now-retired physics professor Frederick Bruhweiler as a one-man CUA research team with a strong interest in enhancing the level of research and educational opportunities available for CUA faculty, research staff, and students. Two decades later, the institute now involves nearly 50 CUA researchers at NASA Goddard who study a variety of topics related to astrophysics, planetary science, and heliophysics. Steven Kraemer, professor and chair of the physics department, serves as the director of the institute. De Mello is among the IACS researchers.
The partnership works because it is mutually beneficial. NASA benefits from the work of leading academics while the University gains access to the government’s state-of-the art resources, including telescopes and laboratories. The expenses for the research work are covered in part by NASA’s budget, as well as grants from outside sources attained through the University.
When a talented new student comes to CUA interested in working at Goddard, IACS personnel will often network among their NASA contacts to find an open research position. Thirteen doctoral physics students currently work at the facility. More students, including some undergraduates, have worked there as summer interns.
“We have so many connections there, so we talk with our collaborators and our friends to see who is interested in working with students. The fact that we are so close physically to Goddard [approximately 12 miles away] makes our program very successful,” de Mello said. “Our goal is to open the doors for [students] at NASA. We try to give them a hand and put them on the right path.”
In addition to providing hands-on research experience, she believes working alongside world renowned astrophysicists can motivate students to work harder and ask tougher questions.“The NASA environment is very inspirational,” she said. “To be a scientist requires a lot of dedication and students see that.”
Approximately half of the students researching at NASA Goddard spend their time working in the astrophysics division, where they study stars, galaxies, nebulae, and other objects in the universe.
Soto was part of a team that in 2014 captured the most colorful deep image of the universe,a composite of several exposures taken by Hubble cameras. The image uses the full range of colors available to the Hubble and captures approximately 10,000 galaxies, dating back in time to within only a few hundred million years of the big bang. Discoveries with this image will add missing pieces to the puzzle of galaxy formation, including details on how the Milky Way came to exist.
As part of her research at NASA Goddard, Soto works with de Mello analyzing images from the Hubble Space Telescope to learn more about how galaxies are formed.
In 2013, Soto, who is Hispanic, was named the recipient of NASA’s prestigious Jenkins Pre-doctoral Fellowship, which seeks to increase the number of graduate degrees awarded to underrepresented persons in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines.
“It feels great because you know you are looking at things no one else has paid attention to,” Soto said. “I get to look at images before they are released to the public and to raw data that not many people have seen. It’s amazing.”
Trevor Torpin, a doctoral student from outside of Lincoln, Neb., is also researching in NASA Goddard’s astrophysics division. His work involves studying the behavior patterns of the black hole binary LMC X-3, a black hole and star that orbit together. The black hole binary follows distinct patterns, in which it appears brighter and dimmer at certain times. By examining spectra and light curves from NASA’s Swift telescope, as well as the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s MAXI telescopes, Torpin is hoping to learn more about the variability of the binary, including what causes those behavioral changes.
Torpin said he feels lucky to work with telescopes alongside the scientists who created them. His advisor at NASA, Patricia Boyd, is a deputy project scientist for the Hubble Space Telescope.
Though his research involves entities that are about 165,000 light years away, Torpin loves that he is adding to NASA’s space expertise.
“I think it’s important to broaden our horizons,” he said. “This work may not have much practical purpose right now, but it is expanding human knowledge.”
For nearly five years, Catholic University has managed the Center for Excellence in the Physics of the Heliosphere and the Sun, a cooperative agreement with NASA Goddard’s Heliophysics Science Division, which researches the physics of the sun and its effect on the solar system. About half of the doctoral students at Goddard work in this group, where their main area of study is space weather, the interaction of matter emitted by the sun and the Earth’s magnetic field.
Space weather can include solar flares, solar storms, and coronal mass ejections (CME) — large bubbles of gas and magnetic field that occasionally erupt from the sun. These solar behaviors are the cause of aurorae like the Northern and Southern Lights. They can also adversely affect high frequency radio communications, satellite technologies, and power grids.
Very large solar storms can induce currents in power grids that can break those systems down completely. In 1989, a severe geomagnetic storm resulted in nine hours of power outages for the entire province of Quebec. Magnetic storms can also make it dangerous for astronauts or even pilots in Arctic areas, leaving them exposed to radiation.
“Space weather is a very violent and turbulent process and it’s becoming more important as technology develops,” said Vadim Uritsky, an IACS researcher and associate professor of physics who studies space weather. “Human technology has become more and more sophisticated and at the same time more and more vulnerable to its effects.”
John O’Neill, a doctoral student from Boston, Mass., works in a lab building instrumentation for new devices to study the sun. With the guidance of his advisor, Joseph Davila (pictured in the table of contents), a senior scientist in NASA’s heliophysics division, O’Neill is currently working on a photon sieve, a special optic lens for a spectrometer, an instrument that measures spectrums of light. The sieve will allow the spectrometer to capture images depicting the temperature variations within the sun’s corona that are 12 times as detailed as any taken previously. After it is tested, the sieve could one day be placed on a satellite and flown into space.
“We’re fairly confident that the photon sieve will be able to get better images of the sun at a higher resolution so we will be able to see higher details,” O’Neill said. “If we can understand how these solar processes work, one of the goals for people working in space weather is to be able to forecast these things.”
O’Neill said he feels lucky to work in a lab setting, with devices that could one day play an important role in space missions. “I’ve always loved that marriage between theory and experimentation,” he said.
Doctoral students Suzanne Smith and Amy Rager also work with space instruments as part of their research under NASA fields and particles astrophysicist Craig Pollock. Their work revolves around a mission currently in space, the Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission (MMS), in which four identically instrumented spacecraft simultaneously study the Earth’s magnetosphere.
Since the MMS mission launched last March, Rager and Smith have been in charge of practicalities like tracking the health of the machines. As the spacecraft begin to collect results, they will help look at the data to draw conclusions about magnetic reconnection, a process that causes solar flares, magnetic storms, and other space weather. Right now, scientists have little understanding of how magnetic reconnection works.
“These students are totally integrated into our science and engineering teams,” Pollock said. “They’re here every day. They wake up in the morning, eat breakfast, and come to work here, and they have real responsibilities.”
Smith said she applied to CUA specifically because of the University’s strong connections with NASA. She first visited NASA Goddard as a physics undergraduate at Lycoming College in Williamsport, Pa. “I came down here for a visit and I fell in love with Goddard,” she said. “I knew I wanted to get in here one way or another.”
Rager, who has worked with Pollock for two years, grew up in Maryland and earned her Bachelor's degree at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. A lifelong lover of science, she began working at NASA Goddard when she was in high school.
“As soon as I got my permit I was driving here,” she said. “That’s why I chose Catholic University. I thought it was great that this school already had a pipeline set up where students can get in to NASA and find the resources they need.”
Ashley Jones, a doctoral student from Durham, N.C., began working at NASA Goddard as an intern after earning her bachelor's degree in physics from Duke University. Jones loved the internship so much that she became determined to find a job at NASA Goddard. After working a year as a data technician, her mentor suggested she enroll as a graduate student at Catholic University so she could continue her research work.
When Jones looked into the University, she realized she already knew and had worked with some of the professors and IACS research faculty. “[Studying at CUA] seemed like an easy decision to make,” she said.
Jones is currently working on a CubeSat — a miniature satellite that will go into low-earth orbit and study particles trapped in the earth’s magnetic field. Because there are only 10 people on her team, Jones is involved with all aspects of the satellite, from design to construction to building simulations and, someday, analyzing the data. Jones also analyzes data of larger satellites that are already in the air, including the Van Allen Probes that were launched in 2012.
By providing more details on the earth’s magnetic field, Jones’s research could help scientists understand areas in which astronauts or pilots could be vulnerable to radiation. Her research also will examine how space weather interacts with the earth’s magnetic field.
“It’s so cool to me this concept that there are these things going on right around Earth that we don’t understand,” Jones said. “I like that I don’t have to be a climate scientist to study science that affects people and the earth.”
Not all students who benefit from the NASA Goddard connection are graduate students, or even physics students. Junior Ethan Robinett, of Haymarket,Va., a mechanical engineering and math double major, met Uritsky during a Physics for Engineering class last year. At Uritsky’s recommendation, Robinett applied for a NASA internship and began working at NASA Goddard in June.
Over the summer, he spent 40 hours a week in NASA Goddard’s space weather lab learning how to chart and track various solar events. During that time, his team helped to track one of the largest solar events in three years. A CME was observed with a measured speed of 1,250 kilometers per second, directed straight at Earth. The result was a severe geomagnetic storm.
Though Robinett and his team usually worked in NASA Goddard’s Community Coordinated Modeling Center, a room with large screens displaying data and images, they watched this CME in a separate room on a large projector screen, surrounded by excited heliophysicists.
“Everyone on the team was anticipating a strong arrival,” Robinett said. “It was a CME, where the sun shoots out a lot of hot plasma. This one actually was big enough that when it arrived at Earth, it pushed our magnetosphere way back. It caused a lot of magnetic field problems and caused spacecraft orbiting very close to Earth to be exposed.”
At the end of the summer, Robinett was selected to continue working part time with NASA. Now, he logs on to the NASA system for 12 hours a week from his room in CUA’s Millennium North residence hall. By looking at satellite reports, he is able to monitor data and models related to CMEs, solar flares, and other events that can be hazardous to spacecraft.
In the future, Uritsky hopes CUA students will have similar opportunities to assist with space weather forecasting. This spring, the physics department will open its own Space Weather Forecasting Center within Hannan Hall. The center, funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation, will include state-of-the-art computers and monitors connected to live feeds from NASA Goddard.
Uritsky says the new center will provide an access point for undergraduate and graduate students to learn about space weather. Next year, he will offer a class for undergraduates all about space weather forecasting.
“Students will be able to do research at NASA and the center will, logistically and software-wise, be completely consistent,” Uritsky said. “We want to use this to help our undergraduates understand physics better. Even if they don’t want to become space weather researchers in the future, this is a way of educating them in plasma physics and modern physics in general at a much higher level than they would probably expect.”
Uritsky has also made an effort to introduce nonphysics students to the research at NASA Goddard. Last year, he took a group of 11 honors students on a backstage tour of the science facility. During the tour, students received a sneak peek at the NASA testing facilities and caught a glimpse of the construction efforts for the James Webb Space Telescope, the successor to the Hubble, which is expected to launch in 2018.
By introducing more students to NASA research and space weather, Uritsky hopes to show them how physics is ever-changing.
“Often textbooks show physics as a solved equation or a game that is over, and that is not true,” he said. “I always emphasize that this is the cutting edge of physics and that the cutting edge means there are many things we do not yet understand.”
Uritsky enjoys bringing students to NASA because he can see it ignite something within them: a sense of wonder and curiosity. Suddenly, students who were bored will have a spark in their eyes, and a yearning to answer new questions.
Soto knows that yearning well. What she enjoys most about working at NASA Goddard is being able to make new discoveries while striving to understand space in a deeper way. “There is still so much unknown out there,” she said. “I think all of us enjoy that journey and that search to learn another small fraction of the puzzle. It’s cool to know there’s so much more that needs to be discovered.”
Similarly, O’Neill said he enjoys building upon the massive body of knowledge NASA has already acquired.
“The most rewarding part is helping to go that extra step and pushing the envelope a little more,” he said. “We’re all trying to figure out one more piece of the puzzle about how everything fits together.”
Scientists around the world were astounded in February when the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in Hanford, Wash., announced its discovery of gravitational waves, tiny ripples in space and time that were first predicted by Albert Einstein in 1916. The detected wave, whose signal sounded like a short chirping noise, was caused by a collision of two black holes a billion light-years away. It was detected using a pair of laser interferometers located in Hanford and Livingston, La.
Though the gravitational wave detection may have come as a surprise for some space watchers, it is the result of several decades of research and experimentation. That research was kick-started by the groundbreaking research of alumnus Joseph Weber, who earned his Ph.D. in physics from Catholic University in 1951.
While studying at Catholic University, Weber focused his attention on microwave spectroscopy, laying the groundwork for what is now known as quantum electronics. In 1952, he became the first person to present research on how to produce lasers and masers — ideas that were inspired in part by a class taught by longtime professor Karl Herzfeld.
During the 1960s, Weber became the first person to build a gravitational wave detector. His version, the “Weber Bar,” was a large aluminum bar that acted as a resonance chamber for certain frequencies. Though Weber never successfully detected a gravitational wave with his method, his work inspired a generation of physicists to search for what Einstein had previously theorized could never be seen.
“Joseph Weber was really a pioneer in gravitational wave detection,” said Tommy Wiklind, professor in the Department of Physics. While earning his doctorate in physics at the Chalmers Institute of Technology in Sweden, Wiklind’s thesis advisor was physicist Gustaf Rydbeck, a former doctoral student of Weber’s. Though Wiklind never met Weber before his death in 2000, he remembers spending hours discussing his research.
“He is a colorful profile in many respects and he’s known all over the world,” Wiklind said. “CUA should be proud, absolutely, to call him an alumnus.”
Wiklind believes the recent discovery of gravitational waves will likely lead to many new findings about the inner mechanics of the universe.
“This opens up a whole new window in astrophysics and every time we’ve opened up a new window, we’ve detected new things that were not predicted to be there,” Wiklind said. “It’s very exciting to see what we are going to find out with this.”