Look Who it Was Random video

Jim Burch | A Magnetospheric Odyssey

778 views · Published 24 November 2014 · 35:15 · Indexed 12 November 2026

Channel: Michigan Engineering · 2014 · Science & Technology

Watch on YouTube

The annual Nelson W. Spencer Memorial Lecture will be presented by James L. Burch, the vice president of space science and engineering at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio.
A Magnetospheric Odyssey:
The first United States orbiting satellite, Explorer 1, discovered the radiation belts and hence the Earth’s magnetosphere. In addition to being our home in space, the magnetosphere, by virtue of its interaction with the solar wind,  exhibits a wide variety of dynamic space plasma phenomena. It is indeed an interesting and important place. But there are numerous magnetospheres in the solar system and no two are even remotely alike. Exoplanet magnetospheres certainly exist, and at even much greater distances pulsar magnetospheres have long been studied. The opportunities for research on magnetospheres are limitless for theorists, but experimentalists need to be involved in space missions in order to join in the fun. Luckily there have been numerous such missions and some more on the horizon. 
Any career in research has aspects of an odyssey. Like Odysseus, I have found it to be a long wandering full of adventures, marked by many changes of fortune, but resulting in greater knowledge and understanding. My Odyssey started with Atmosphere Explorer during which I made good friends and worked closely with Nelson Spencer and numerous other scientists from Goddard and Michigan, which were closely linked then as even now. Dynamics Explorer and IMAGE provided both detailed probing and global imaging of the polar magnetosphere. Later work on Cassini opened new doors to what is surely the most fascinating and mysterious magnetosphere imaginable. 
Currently Rosetta is providing close-up views of a comet just awakening with sure signs of an incipient solar-wind interaction and ultimately a magnetosphere of sorts. Soon the next phase will begin with the launch of Magnetospheric Multiscale in March 2015. For MMS the magnetosphere is really incidental, its significance being the only place where magnetic reconnection can be probed in detail. Reconnection is one of the most important plasma physics phenomena, having applications in the laboratory, in the solar corona, and throughout the universe at places such as accretion disks surrounding neutron stars and black holes. It is a fascinating and difficult experiment to tackle, and we look forward to it very much.
This talk will concentrate mostly on science, but inevitably people, institutions, travel and, alas, governments are involved, especially in a big science such as space research. Some of the adventures and changes of fortune inevitably arise outside the science but have nonetheless been important parts of the odyssey.

Burch graduated with a PhD in space science from Rice University in 1968. He is principal investigator of the NASA IMAGE mission and principal investigator of the instrument suite science team for the NASA Magnetospheric Multiscale mission. He is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) and an awardee of the AGU Van Allen Lectureship.

Hosted by Atmospheric, Oceanic, and Space Sciences
http://aoss.engin.umich.edu/

More from this channel