CliMAS colloquia

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Seminar coordinator for Spring 2024 is Professor Deanna Hence: dhence@illinois.edu

Seminar: Professor Lara Waldrop, UIUC-ECE

Event Type
Seminar/Symposium
Sponsor
Professor Larry Di Girolamo
Location
2079 NHB
Date
Feb 14, 2023   3:30 - 5:00 pm  
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A New Era of Exospheric Remote Sensing

One of the most significant gaps in our knowledge of Earth’s near-space environment concerns its exosphere.  As the outermost layer of the atmosphere, it plays a critical role in mediating Earth’s response to solar forcing and in permanent atmospheric evolution through the gravitational escape of its constituent hydrogen atoms.   Reliable characterization of its spatial structure and temporal variability is notoriously difficult, owing mainly to the challenges of routine, global sensing over its vast extent, which ranges from ~500 kilometers above Earth’s surface to more than 150,000 km, about halfway to lunar orbit.  I will begin my talk with a brief overview of the successes and limitations of the many ground- and space-based attempts to investigate the exosphere to date. I will end by introducing a new mission that is ideally suited for exospheric sensing: The Carruthers Geocorona Observatory.   The Carruthers mission is currently in Phase C development as a NASA Solar Terrestrial Probes Science Mission of Opportunity, which will be deployed to the Earth-Sun L1 Lagrangian equilibrium point via rideshare with the IMAP launch in 2025.   From its distant vantage, Carruthers will obtain wide-field, high-resolution, and high-cadence images of ultraviolet exospheric emission and significantly advance our understanding of the nature and origin of exospheric structure and variability.

 

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