Dr. David McComas, IMAP PI
While summer is quickly ending, progress did not slow down for the IMAP team in August. Several more teams and instruments completed their critical design reviews, and two in-person gatherings occurred. The IMAP Team met at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics in Boulder, CO. to discuss the centers for payload operations and science data, as well as the unique IMAP Active Link for Real Time (I-ALiRT), which will measure and report The conditions and activity observed in interplanetary space caused by the Sun’s activity, such as solar flares, solar storms, and coronal mass ejections (CMEs). Severe space weather conditions directed towards Earth can impact infrastructure and technology on Earth, as well as satellites, spacecraft, and astronauts in its trajectory. data in near-real time.
Members of the IMAP Team also attended the IMAP Mission Launch Services Kick Off Meeting at Space-X Headquarters in Hawthorne, CA. with NASA Launch Services Providers, Space-X, and other representatives of the ride share payloads that will launch with IMAP in 2025. Great excitement came from this kickoff, as well as gratitude to the partners we are working with for Launch Day in 2025.
This month, our IMAP Team Spotlight Feature is from the Solar Wind Electron (SWE) instrument team at Los Alamos National Laboratories in New Mexico. SWE recently completed their CDR. Work on the flight instrument has now enthusiastically begun.
SWE will measure in situ solar wind electrons and perform solar wind observations, assisting us in better understanding the local structures that can affect acceleration and transport of these particles. SWE also provides near real-time measurements for the IMAP I-ALiRT space weather monitoring service, along with the SWAPI, MAG, CoDICE, and HIT instruments. The I-ALiRT system will enable new ways of forecasting space weather by streaming real-time observations of conditions from Lagrange Point 1 is an orbital path in space about one million miles from Earth towards the Sun that is without any magnetic interference from the planets., which is about one million miles from Earth towards the Sun, that are headed towards Earth to operators on the ground. The complete set of measurements is a first in space weather forecasting that is truly groundbreaking.
I would now like to introduce Hannah Mohr, an electrical engineer on the SWE sensor head working for SWE instrument lead, Ruth Skoug. Hannah is enthusiastic about her work on SWE and the team she works with. We really value her talent and all the skills that she brings to the job.
Go IMAP Go!
IMAP Team Spotlight Feature: Hannah Mohr, Electrical Engineer
Hannah Mohr loves all that Los Alamos County, New Mexico has to offer: the limitless outdoor splendor surrounding Los Alamos, friends that share joy in playing strategic board games, her pandemic-kitten-now-cat, Onyx, and her work as an electrical engineer for the SWE team at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL).
It's exciting to get to work on a project of this scale, where there's so many different instruments on IMAP that are all going to be ultimately working together to achieve something that individually, we wouldn't be able to do. I think that it is an incredible experience to get to be a part of because the potential outcomes from this project, scientifically, are just outstanding. It's just very, very exciting to get to be a part of that while at the same time, expand my understanding of The study of the Sun and its connection to the solar system, including the physical processes that occur in the space environment., as well as some engineering capabilities that we're getting to advance as we move forward [with SWE].
Hannah’s work involves using tiny particles for a big impact. “My piece is taking [a] really small, tiny signal and amplifying it [a second time] after it's been amplified directly on the An instrument which is used to discover that something is present somewhere, or to measure how much of something there is..” She then digitizes it and sends it over to the electronics box for further processing by the people at Southwest Research Institute. “My responsibility is making it so that they actually have a measurable signal to receive.”
Part of the enticement in her work is the opportunities to problem solve the challenges discovered in the testing phase. While Hannah’s team had the SWE engineering model (EM) in the chamber, they observed “cross talk” between the EM detectors. “As a team, we really dug into it and did a lot of background research into how these kinds of things could happen and then how it might be affecting our instrument and we were able to come up with a solution for it, and then a way to test that solution and we saw considerable improvement…to be able to come up with a way to test it with our current hardware to sort of validate our solution before we had to commit to it was really, really nice.”
While SWE has heritage instrumentation, there is also opportunity in optimizing those previous designs. We are still able to drive forward on the engineering innovation, which is something that I care a lot about.
What else does Hannah love most about working on SWE? “I love my team. I love working with them and being able to come to work and get to interact with these really smart individuals who are also really nice and easy to get along with – it just makes the whole thing so enjoyable. I really could not ask for a better team on this project and that's probably the number one thing.”
Like other IMAP instrument teams, the SWE team is entering into the flight build phase after completing their CDR, bringing a new kind of excitement. “You know you kind of get into your day to day, and you don't think about it [much]. But then, you step back and you're contemplating the project as a whole and you [realize], “Oh, that [flight hardware item] right over there? That's the real deal; that's actually going. That doesn't happen a whole lot for me in my work, because it takes a while to build an instrument, so it's not every day that you're working with the something that is going to be the one that actually flies.”
Hannah doesn’t just love her work, the outdoors, or playing with her cat. She also enjoys creating and engineering in the kitchen. “It's so gratifying, to take a bunch of ingredients that alone are kind of meaningless, and then you combine them all together into something that just really makes you happy to eat. In a way that's sort of how I feel about engineering, as well. You start out with a bunch of items that don't really do what you need them to do and then through enough planning and thinking and doing, you end up with something that just makes you happy.”