Name: Danielle Crawford
Job Role at the University: Senior System Administrator and Science Operations Center Manager for the TRACERS contract.
How long you have been at the University: Since September 1994, over 30 years. Congrats Danielle!
Can you tell us a bit about your background and how you got started in your field?
My degree was in computer science and international studies. And my first job at the university was working in the Business Office of the IMU doing database programming. I worked for Clark Cooper, who is still an employee at ITS and we made the IMU business systems run.
And then how did you get into physics and astronomy? Around 2009, after the floods, a lot changed at the IMU and it was time for me to start casting about for a change in my career. A friend of mine who is a coworker at physics now had known that I was looking around and he said, hey, there's this position at physics that Dr. Craig Kletzing is hiring for. Why don't you put in your application? That started my tenure with Craig in January of 2010.
What types of research happens in your department? I support the research of space physics groups in our department, starting with Dr. Kletzing and now continuing under Dr. David Miles. In particular, they study heliophysics, that is to say how the sun interacts with the earth. A lot of our missions are low Earth orbit near Earth. These are satellite missions, which analyze how the sun's solar wind interacts with the magnetosphere of the Earth. I’m not a physicist, but you hang around them long enough and you pick up what they’re doing and it's really incredibly fascinating.
How does this research affect the lives Iowans, or the general population, in ways that might not be obvious to an outside observer? That's a really good question because a lot of this science is not obvious to the outside observer. What they're doing is analyzing how the sun interacts with the Earth, and that's part of NASA's “Living With A Star” program. This program focuses on the effects that the sun has on life on Earth. The sun is the source of all the energy that creates life on Earth, and the solar wind is particularly powerful. You'll hear these stories in the newspaper about solar flares popping out, and while the sun is always producing them, occasionally the odds are good and a solar flare comes out of the sun that happens to intersect with the Earth. And when that happens? All that energy has to go somewhere. And the Earth's magnetosphere deflects it. It redirects it and some of it gets down to the ground where we are and some of it goes through the magnetosphere to create electromagnetic effects that the scientists study, and that I help them with those studies. Those effects have a great effect, especially on all electronics and telecommunication devices on Earth. It's very likely that radiation can affect communication satellites and research satellites. Even terrestrial, ground level electronics can be affected. And what that means is that we could have big communications blackouts if we don’t understand what’s happening and why it happens. That's the danger of not understanding. What the positive effects are is that there's a lot of physics that goes on that people are slowly understanding and the sun and the earth are just two giant electromagnetic factors in our solar system. It's like a constant experiment. And by studying those, we can learn about fundamental physics forces at the macro scale and perhaps apply it at the micro scale, such as in computing, just advancing our knowledge of science.
How does your personal work support these research efforts? My personal work is as Science Operations Center Manager of the TRACERS project. Our job is to send commands to spacecraft and then receive the telemetry from the spacecraft, in order to produce data products which then show what science is being done. These are spacecraft and instruments that Iowa designs. It's still rather expensive to get data from a satellite down to Earth, so it transmits the data as compressed as possible, and then on the ground we decompress it, take it apart, and put it back together again in data files that can be analyzed, and then we distribute it to the scientific community and the public.
What are some of the biggest goals your team is working towards? The biggest goal is the TRACERS project that Dr Kletzing started, and Dr Miles is continuing. Tracers is the Tandem Reconnection and Cusp Electrodynamics Reconnaissance Satellites, and they are designed to determine whether a feature of magnetic bodies called magnetic reconnection happens due to spatially, temporally or both. That is to say, that when the solar wind hits the Earth's magnetosphere, it compresses that bubble. It's like a wind blowing on a soap bubble, and eventually the bubble pops. Well, in the case of the Earth, the bubble doesn't go away, it then reforms on the other side of the planet and understanding how that happens is one of the mysteries. It's one of the scientific goals; it's a big one for the TRACERS project. And a lot of these scientific goals chain from mission to mission. What Mission 1 does then leads to questions for Mission 2 and then Mission 2 leads to questions for Mission 3, and so on. Iowa missions over decades have answered questions and then proposed new questions, which we then subsequently answer on new missions. It's how science works, and it's pretty awesome.