Supercomputers capture turbulence in the solar wind

Solar storms unleash bursts of radiation that can reach crew and passengers on commercial flights at certain altitudes and latitudes. 

Eventually the system could be used to log radiation exposure over longer periods of time for pilots and flight crews. 

Credit: NASA

As inhabitants of Earth, our lives are dominated by weather.

Not just in the form of rain and snow from atmospheric clouds, but also a sea of charged particles and magnetic fields generated by a star sitting 93 million miles away—our Sun.

This phenomenon is called solar wind.

When strong magnetic storms occur on the Sun, tons of highly energetic particles are released into the solar wind.

If these particles were free to hit the Earth, the radiation would cause life-threatening damage to our DNA, debilitate power grids, disrupt communications networks and damage electronic devices.

Fortunately for us, the Earth's magnetic dipole field and magnetosphere act as an invisible shield barring these particles from plummeting through the atmosphere.

However, this magnetic shield is not perfect and during particularly intense solar storms the magnetosphere can "crack," allowing charged particles to seep in and wreak havoc on the Earth's technological infrastructure—an event calledspace weather.

Homa Karimabadi

Scientists currently do not have the ability to accurately predict the severity of a space weather event or where it will have the most impact but a team of researchers led by University of California, San Diego's (UCSD's) Homa Karimabadi is hoping to change that.

"One of the challenges in developing accurate predictive forecasts is that the solar wind is turbulent, and the details of turbulence are not well understood," says Karimabadi, who heads the space plasma simulation group at UCSD.

Because turbulence in the solar wind occurs on widely different scales of physics—from planet-size to the sub-atomic—it is especially difficult to study but using supercomputers at the National Institute of Computational Sciences (NICS), Karimabadi and his colleagues managed to simulate all the scales of solar wind turbulence at once—for the first time ever.

Burlen Loring

To make sense of this massive dataset, they tapped Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) Visualization Specialist Burlen Loring, who developed custom analysis tools using supercomputers at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC).

Loring's work allows researchers to study turbulence in unprecedented detail, and the results may hold clues about some of the processes that lead to destructive space weather events. This work was published in Physics of Plasmas.

More information: Read the paper: hpcvis.com/PhysPlasmas_20_012303.pdf

Melvin Calvin's moon dust rediscovered at Berkeley Lab

Moon dust found in Berkeley Lab storage. Credit: Marilee Bailey

When Apollo 11 returned from its historic flight in 1969, the moon rocks and lunar soil collected by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin eventually found their way to some 150 laboratories worldwide.

One of those was the Space Sciences Laboratory in Latimer Hall on the UC Berkeley campus.

After experiments were conducted and papers published, those samples should have been sent back to NASA.

Instead they wound up in storage, where they sat collecting dust until they were discovered more than four decades later.

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) archivist Karen Nelson uncovered the moon dust—about 20 vials with handwritten labels and dated "24 July 1970"—last month while reviewing and clearing out artifacts from Berkeley Lab's warehouse.

"They were vacuum sealed in a glass jar," said Nelson, who has worked in Berkeley Lab's Archives and Records Office for 17 years. "We don't know how or when they ended up in storage."

Along with the jar was a copy of the paper "Study of carbon compounds in Apollo 11 and Apollo 12 returned lunar samples," published in the Proceedings of the Second Lunar Science Conference in 1971.

Melvin Calvin

Among the five co-authors, all from the Space Sciences Laboratory, is Melvin Calvin, who was also an associate director of Berkeley Lab (then known as Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory) and 1961 winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

The paper examined the nature and chemical characteristics of the carbon in the lunar samples.

According to a biography of Calvin by Glenn Seaborg and Andrew Benson, Calvin helped shape NASA's efforts to search for extraterrestrial life, including searching for organic and biologic compounds in the lunar samples.

Nelson contacted the Space Sciences Laboratory.

Berkeley Lab archivist Karen Nelson holds lunar samples used by Melvin Calvin for scientific experiments 43 years ago. Credit: Roy Kaltschmidt

"They were surprised we had the samples," she said. She then contacted NASA, who asked that the samples be sent back but allowed her to first open the jar to remove the vials.

Next she is trying to figure out what to do with other equipment from Calvin's lab, mainly glass pieces from Berkeley Lab's own glass shop.

In fact, Berkeley Lab's warehouse in San Jose contains 140 other pieces of scientific equipment that Nelson, who has a master's degree in museum studies, has been charged with clearing out.

While a few of the more important items will go on display at Berkeley Lab, she hopes the Smithsonian might be interested in some of the others.

"We're hoping another institution will be able to display them," she said. "The problem is we don't have room for display or storage."

While the Berkeley Lab Archives and Records Office will still accept some historically significant artifacts, it is quite limited in what it can accept. Fortunately, in this age of supercomputers, there are fewer and fewer tangible scientific artifacts.

"Scientists are using less machinery and more computers," she said.