What can school children gain from heliophysics?

M Guhathakurta

I am an astrophysicist by training and at graduate school I specialized in just one star, the sun. In my research career I expanded this specialization to include the study of the sun’s effects on the earth. And today I am a science manager of a program called “Living with a Star” (LWS), our sun, at NASA.

So, why study the sun at all?
Did you know that the earth orbits inside the atmosphere of the sun? In that sense we truly are living with this star. Even though to the naked eye, the sun appears to be a constant, it is only a limitation of the human eye. Modern telescopes and spacecraft have penetrated the sun’s blinding glare and found a maelstrom of unpredictable turmoil.

A hundred years ago, the sun-earth connection was of interest to only a small number of scientists. Solar activity had little effect on daily life. Today, a single strong solar storm (solar flare, coronal mass ejections, transient events…) could bring civilization to its knees. Modern society has come to depend on technologies sensitive to solar radiation and solar storms that lead to geomagnetic storms. Particularly vulnerable are intercontinental power grids, satellite operations and communications, and GPS navigation. These technologies are woven into the fabric of daily life, from cell phone, the Internet, health care and finance to basic utilities.

At the dawn of the Space Age more than 50 years ago, “protecting ourselves” meant protecting our assets on earth. Now it means something much bigger. NASA and other space agencies have sent probes to the far corners of the solar system, from Mercury, Mars, Venus, to Pluto and beyond. The Voyager spacecrafts are on the verge of leaving the solar system altogether. To protect these robotic assets, and the humans who will inevitably follow them, we must learn to understand and forecast the conditions created and driven directly by the sun’s emissions (also known as space weather), anywhere, anytime, throughout the solar system.

Just like our home atmosphere is subject to violent and damaging storms, such as hurricanes and cyclones, our space environment undergoes violent disruptions driven by powerful flares and coronal mass ejections from the sun. These storms, which define the weather of our space environment, are much more energetic than the storms of terrestrial weather. Space storms are sometimes so explosive that they produce strong shock waves that completely deform the earth’s magnetized atmosphere, the magnetosphere, and ultra-high energy particle radiation that can penetrate shielding to damage satellite electronics and, more importantly, the health of our astronauts. Furthermore, the effects of space weather are not confined to the space environment, but reach all the way down to the ground to produce the radiation that is dangerous to aircraft and current surges that can disrupt our electric power systems.

LWS has stitched together many seemingly disparate sciences to create the new field of Heliophysics. “Helio”-physics is the study of the physical domain defined by the sun – the heliosphere, just like “astro”-physics is the study of the physical domain defined by stars – the rest of the universe. Note that by the term “heliosphere” we refer to the whole volume carved out of the Milky Way by our sun, not just to the solar wind. This physical domain includes the sun itself, the solar system, interaction with planetary ionosphere/magnetosphere and stretches out to the start of interstellar matter. In principle, heliophysics studies everything inside the sun’s domain of influence.

How do we study the sun?
The best way to learn about the sun is to watch it. I don’t mean going outside and staring into the bright light. I mean monitoring the sun, watching it flare, learning when its solar wind streams ignite auroras, and so on. The sun is a living thing (sort of) and the best, most engaging way to learn about it is to watch what it does. NASA provides lots of websites and links which support understanding of the dynamic sun and its impact on earth and other planets.

Journey to the Stars download and DVD giveaway project
This is a very successful communications program, which reaches out to members of the general public by giving away heliophysics-supported communication materials. Chief among these are the DVDs Journey to the Stars, the 3D Sun, and Cosmic Collisions, as shown n this screenshot of the project homepage (http://journeytothestars.org): Note the Watch Online button in the screenshot. We have developed the ability to offer live streaming of these DVDs to members of the general public. This requires us to maintain a fast, high-bandwidth streaming server.The DVD comes with a teacher’s guide and activities: http://science.nasa.gov/media/medialibrary/2010/06/06/J2S_SupportingMaterials.pdf.

Supporting materials that come with the DVD are every science teacher’s dream. A teacher’s guide offers tips for using the DVD as a classroom teaching tool. Activities for grade levels 3 through 12 are fun, innovative, and meet national science standards. It’s all written in plain language, beautifully illustrated with scenes from the show and new data hot off the presses from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory.

Thanks to NASA, supernovas are going off in classrooms around the world – no safety glasses required. It’s done via the DVD called Journey to the Stars. We want every classroom to have a copy and students of all ages from K through 12 will enjoy the show – and never look at the night sky the same way again.

The Journey to the Stars program has been very successful. Since the beginning of the 2013 school year, 4037 people have signed up to download the DVDs for use in households or schools, and 1604 people have logged in to view the videos online. Here is a world map of Journey to the Stars downloads: http://journeytothestars.org/markerclusterer/examples/map.php.

You can zoom into individual pushpins to see the comments subscribers have made. And there are a couple of subscribers from India as well.

3D sun for the iPhone
Imagine holding the entire sun in the palm of your hand. Now you can. A new iPhone app developed by NASA-supported programmers delivers a live global view of the sun directly to your cell phone. Users can fly around the star, zoom in on active regions, and monitor solar activity. The name of the app is “3D Sun” and it may be downloaded free of charge at Apple’s app store. Just enter “3D Sun” in the Store’s search box or visit http://3dsun.org for a direct link. Real-time images used to construct the 3-dimensional sphere are beamed to earth by the Solar-Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO), a pair of spacecraft. With this app, you can spin the sun, zoom in on sunspots, inspect coronal holes – and when a solar flare erupts, your phone plays a little jingle to alert you.

Screen capture of 3D Sun on the iPhone. The application allows users to spin the sphere by flicking it and zoom in by pinching the screen.

Interplanetary 3D Sun for the iPhone
In the past, the 3D Sun was primarily earth-oriented, but now it works for other planets, spacecraft, and comets, too. The new and improved app is called i3DSun, short for interplanetary 3D Sun. NASA has spacecraft scattered throughout the solar system – from Mercury to the edge of the heliosphere itself. Using this app, scientists and mission controllers can quickly check to see if a solar flare or CME is heading toward their favourite target. Members of the general public can do it, too. A simple pull-down menu displays targets of interest: Mars, Jupiter, comets, the New Horizons probe en route to Pluto, and many more. Selecting “Mars”, for instance, causes the Mars-facing side of the sun to swivel to the fore. Viewers with second-generation iPads, mini-iPads, and iPhone 5s can download the i3DSun at http://3dsun.org.

Helioviewer

Another item available to teachers and students in India is the SDO Helioviewer: http://www.helioviewer.org/

It offers resources that could support an educational theme of “watching what the sun is doing.” The website doesn’t offer a lot of layperson-friendly instruction on how to use it, but I think most students/teachers would quickly figure it out by just fiddling around. Here is a user guide: http://wiki.helioviewer.org/wiki/Helioviewer.org_User_Guide_2.4.0

In the “Be a Scientist for a Day” program, students write essays to suggest targets for the Cassini spacecraft. Observations suggested by winning essays are actually conducted. I think this is a really strong activity that could also be done by students in India. http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/education/scientistforaday13thedition/

Education and public outreach

Ultimately, NASA develops and creates easy access to scientist-vetted, teacher-reviewed materials for the K-12 classroom, such as NASA Wavelength (http://nasawavelength.org); offers ongoing professional development including hands-on training by skilled educators; provides access to scientists to assure that teachers are bringing the most current and accurate science to the classroom and to bring the person into the NASA science discoveries (students often want to know: “how do we know that?” and scientists can help answer that question); And finally brings the excitement of science and exploration to the classroom!! A wealth of material is available on the website http://smdepo.org/welcome.

For teachers, and for online resources, the following links might be helpful

1. Jack Eddy’s book, “The Sun, the Earth and Near-Earth Space”. The entire book is online and can be downloaded from http://ilwsonline.org/ilws_publications.htm
2. The three Think Scientifi cally books are available through iTunes and the links can be found here: http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/epo/educators/thinkscientifically.php These are for elementary level students and are not sun specific.
3. Other education resources from NASA’s Solar Dynamic Observatory mission are: http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/epo/educators/resources.php. The sun-earth day site has lots of resources and activities as well: http://sunearthday.nasa.gov/discoveries/index.php
4. If a teacher wants to give a presentation on the sun and space weather there are three versions for different grade levels here in the Solar Heliospheric Observatory site (as well as a number of other resources): http://soho.nascom.nasa.gov/classroom/for_students.html
5. NASA Wavelength has just about everything that is digitally available from NASA: http://www.nasawavelength.org. Searchable by topics, grade levels, etc.
6. A wealth of resources geared towards advanced graduate students in Heliophysics including the first ever textbooks on Heliophysics can be found at http://www.vsp.ucar.edu/Heliophysics/index.shtml

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The author is an astrophysicist with NASA’s Heliophysics Science Division. She is the lead program scientist with NASA’s ‘Living with a Star’ initiative and serves as program scientist on the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). The author has done her graduation and post graduation from University of Delhi and PhD from University of Denver. She may be reached at mguhathakurta@gmail.com.