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Aug. 9, 2002--The National Research Council's 15-member Solar and Space Physics Survey Committee, which included William Matthaeus, professor of physics in the Bartol Research Institute at the University of Delaware, recently released a report on the future of solar and space physics research.
The committee was asked to assess the current status and future directions of U.S. ground- and space-based solar and space physics research programs, Matthaeus said.
A goal was to identify the key science questions expected to occupy the solar and space physics communities for the decade 2003-13; to outline the initiatives, missions, technologies and infrastructure needed to address those questions; and to recommend research priorities.
Matthaeus said the new research projects in this area benefit greatly from technology advances. “New instrumentation and methods, such as high resolution spectroscopy and fast plasma and energetic particle detectors, are revolutionizing our science,” Matthaeus said, and this will “enable us in the next 10 years to add tremendous depth to our understanding of the space environments of the sun and of the Earth.”
One of the top recommendations of the committee was a large solar probe mission to take flight as soon as possible.
The solar probe would make the first measurements in the innermost region of the heliosphere, the area in space that contains our solar system, solar wind and the entire solar magnetic field. It would be designed to locate the source of the supersonic solar wind and trace the flow of the energy that heats the corona, among other objectives.
The committee also recommended additional space missions to investigate the magnetosphere, the region surrounding a planet in which its magnetic field dominates, and the ionosphere, the part of the Earth's atmosphere that extends from about 30 miles to the exosphere, and to send a spacecraft to orbit the polar region of Jupiter.
Other projects recommended include a solar radio telescope and a relocatable atmospheric observatory to be built and operated by the National Science Foundation, and a solar orbiter that will be built by the European Space Agency with cooperation from NASA.
“The next 10 years should be an exciting time in space physics,” Matthaeus said. “We will continue with the tradition of discovery in space sciences, and now we are in an era in which we can also plan missions of understanding.”
The committee identified as one of the major challenges the need to reveal “basic physical principles manifest in processes in solar and space plasmas,” Matthaeus said. The recommended space physics missions will add to a knowledge base that finds diverse applications ranging from understanding “space weather,” to cosmology, astrophysics and even laboratory fusion energy plasma physics.
Matthaeus served on the committee for two years, and was joined by former
Bartol colleague Gary Zank, who served as chair of one of the committee’s subpanels. Zank is now director of the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at the University of California-Riverside.
The report of the survey committee was accepted by the National Research
Council on Aug. 1, and has been delivered to NASA and the Federal Office of Management and Budget. It will be printed for wide distribution this fall.
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