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J. Kjaer: Hello and welcome to WorldCanvass from International Programs at the University of Iowa. I'm Joan Kjaer and we're coming to you from MERGE in downtown Iowa City. Thank you for joining us. I've been looking forward to tonight's conversation for a long time and I'm really excited to introduce my guest in this first segment. He is Craig Kletzing, just next to me, the Donald A. and Marie B. Gurnett Chair in the Department of Physics and Astronomy here at the University of Iowa. I thank you for being here with us, Craig.

C. Kletzing: Thanks for inviting me. Glad to be here.

J. Kjaer: Yeah, absolutely. Well, it's a real pleasure. Many people listening will know that you recently gained a lot of press coverage and deservedly so when it was announced that you and your team had won a $115 million contract from NASA to study the connection between the magnetic fields of Earth and the Sun. And this contract award, I guess, is the largest external funding award that was ever made here at the university. So that's very cool.

C. Kletzing: That's what I'm told.

J. Kjaer: Yeah, it's really great.

C. Kletzing: I don't have the record so I go with what they tell me.

J. Kjaer: Well, congratulations for that. And for the respect you and your colleagues so obviously earned over many, many decades that UI has been involved in space research. I think all of us in this room know that the Van Allen Radiation Belts were discovered by James Van Allen who taught here at Iowa and conducted his research here. And that discovery goes back to 1958, but honestly that's just the very beginning of what we've been doing here with space. Correct?

C. Kletzing: Correct. Actually it's really the beginning of space experiments for the world, frankly. After Sputnik was launched, shall we say, the U.S. was a little surprised that the Russians were that far ahead of us and had gotten something into orbit, but it didn't measure anything. It essentially went boop, boop. And so they contacted Van Allen. He had experiments that he'd been flying on rockets, rockets that went up first on a balloon and then were launched so they were called rockoons. He had hardware that could fly and so they contacted him and they put Explorer 1 together, which was launched two days before I was born.

J. Kjaer: No kidding? Oh my gosh. Yeah. Well, and then in all these succeeding decades...the Donald Gurnett chair is, obviously, named after one of our most well-regarded space researchers here at the university. And he's just recently retired a couple of years ago, I guess.

C. Kletzing: Indeed. Indeed. Yeah. No, Don just retired this past summer. I mean the space program at the University of Iowa has been steady. It goes all the way back to those first satellites that were flown. I mean, they were very simple in those WorldCanvass - Research at Iowa (Part 1) (Completed 11/06/19) Page 1 of 9 Transcript by Rev.com

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days. But I was just looking at this recently. You know, up to the present date, we have flown I think over 80 satellites that we've been involved with, and dozens of what we call sounding rockets, which are rockets that go up and come back down. So it's been a very, very steady effort here for many, many years. And just in the past few years we've hired some fantastic faculty. So we will be continuing in this game for quite some time to come.

J. Kjaer: Yeah. That's really wonderful. So excuse the elementary nature of this question, but when Dr. Van Allen first began his work, was he looking for something specific or was he just trying to gather data so that he could see whether there was something that made sense?

C. Kletzing: Well, as it turns out, I know the answer to this pretty well because my PhD advisor at the University of California in San Diego was Carl McIlwain, who is one of the students who worked with Van Allen on tests. So I've heard stories about this for my whole career. And what they were looking for were actually were cosmic rays. And that's what they had been measuring on these rockoons that they were flying. And so they expected to see those. What was unexpected was they saw that suddenly the particles they were counting would suddenly stop. And then it would pick back up again and it would stop. And so the initial thought was, oh, our experiment is broken. But my advisor, Carl, went into the lab and showed that actually what was happening is there were so many particles that were hitting their instrument that it would just overwhelm and shut down.

C. Kletzing: And as soon as it dropped off again, it would start to count again. And so that was the first suggestion that there was something there that nobody had thought about before. And then on Explorer 3 they flew a detector that part of it was shielded so it could handle the bigger count rates along with one just like they'd flown on an Explorer 1. And they could say there very definitely is something here. And that led to the discovery of the radiation belts. So the first bit was Explorer 1, but Explorer 3 was the confirmation of seeing it again that we like to have in science.

J. Kjaer: Well, so then can you lead us into where you are now with this TRACERS study and what you're trying to get at?

C. Kletzing: Well, so you know, there's been lots of different missions over the years. The University of Iowa has been involved with several different directions on these things. I think we've been to all but two of the planets. Our instrumentation, actually Don Gurnett's instrument on Voyager, is now the furthest manmade object from the Sun, and has actually gone out into interstellar space. We've flown on all different kinds of things. Most recently we've been involved with a mission back to the Van Allen radiation belts called the Van Allen Probes. It was originally the Radiation Belt Storm Probes, but NASA kind of likes them to be up and working before they name them after somebody. So once we were successfully on orbit, that was rechristened. And then we have another mission, WorldCanvass - Research at Iowa (Part 1) (Completed 11/06/19) Page 2 of 9 Transcript by Rev.com

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the Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission, which is also studying this process and related to our most recent award.

C. Kletzing: There's the Juno mission which is out at Jupiter right now. And there's the Mars Express Mission which is at Mars. So you know, we're still quite active and have many missions with data coming back. This most recent one, the TRACERS mission is actually a mission that's much closer to the Earth. TRACERS stands for the Tandem Reconnection and Cusp Electrodynamics Reconnaissance Satellites. Quite a mouthful, let's repeat after me. But actually with these things we always like to have a good acronym. And so I usually, when we're get a team together and we're putting something together, I say, well look, let's come up with a good acronym. Whoever wins, you know, I have a nice bottle of red wine sitting at home as a reward. And so professor Jasper Halekas of our department was the guy who came up with the name. And so he gets full credit and he got a nice bottle too.

C. Kletzing: And so we're going to fly a pair of satellites near the Earth and we can look at the signature that people have known about for a very, very long time. Actually, it goes back to the early nineties and a paper I worked on with a U.N. colleague who's now in Colorado. We were both at New Hampshire at the time and we saw this general signature, and we showed that it can be explained. But then people looked at it more carefully and said, you know, there are these little jumps in the signature and what's going on with that? And you know, the theorists get involved and people think about it and say, well it could be it's something that's turning off in time, or it could just be something about the different places that you're flying through. And to this day we don't know the answer, which is it?

C. Kletzing: And so we designed this mission to go through with two satellites, one very quickly after the other, and see how it changes and whether it moves or it doesn't move will tell us the difference between these things. And so we proposed that to NASA. They liked it, and now we're proceeding forward into what we call implementation. So we have to do everything.

J. Kjaer: So you don't build the entire satellite here on our campus?

C. Kletzing: No, no. So on these kind of missions, this is what's called a Small Explorer Mission, and that is indeed a direct connection back to Explorer 1. It's a program that's continued at NASA through all these years. And, oh, about 20 years ago or so, a little bit more, they made smaller missions. They broke them into two classes, one called Small Explorers, another called Medium-Class Explorers.

C. Kletzing: They are what we call cost-capped missions. You can only spend so much and NASA is pretty stern about that, and the RPI led. So the PI puts the team together and we have to do everything. So we have to procure the spacecraft, all the instruments. We have to process the data. We have to handle getting the data back down to the ground. Do the science. Everything soup to nuts, except WorldCanvass - Research at Iowa (Part 1) (Completed 11/06/19) Page 3 of 9 Transcript by Rev.com

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the launch. NASA will launch this for us. And so we have partnered with a place called Millennium Space Systems out in El Segundo, a relatively young company that builds small spacecraft in a very economic fashion and they will build the two spacecraft. But we build two of the instruments here at Iowa. One of the instruments is built at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, another at UC Berkeley, and another UC Los Angeles. And then they will all come here. We put all the instruments together and then we back out to California and deliver it to the spacecraft, mount everything and all through this there's test, test, test to make sure everything works.

J. Kjaer: Right, right. And is there any kind of fail safe or backup to any of these instruments once you send them off? I'm sure there are a few heart stopping moments when things happen that you didn't expect to happen. Hopefully the equipment hasn't stopped functioning.

C. Kletzing: Well, this is why we test, test, test. It turns out it's pretty hard to go up there and repair things. So we do a whole, huge amounts of testing. All the instruments are tested individually. Spacecraft subsystems are tested individually. Then it's all put together and then we test the whole thing as a unit. And riding up on a rocket shakes you pretty hard. So we do what we call a vibration test where we shake the heck out of things. It's not a very fun test to watch because you go, oh my goodness, my instrument, what's it going to do to that? Because it gets shaken pretty hard. And then after that we do what we call a thermal vacuum test because space is basically a vacuum. And so one big problem is worrying about, are things going to get too hot? You know on your computer if it didn't have a fan, things might overheat and not work. Well, we don't have a fan in space because we can't blow any air across anything.

C. Kletzing: So what we'll do is put this into a big vacuum chamber and we pump it down and then we take it up in temperature and down in temperature to make sure it can handle all the temperature extremes it might see. And like I say, we do that on individual systems. We do it on the assembled system. And all of this is to make sure that you've really ironed out all the issues in what's going on with your spacecraft. And as part of that, we do something called a day or a week in the life. And so we simulate how we're going to operate, all these kinds of things. So there's lots and lots of pieces. But again, you know, when NASA gives you $115 million, they kind of want it to work, as do the taxpayers that are paying for it. So we do our very best to make sure that things work.

J. Kjaer: So when it launches, when these two satellites are launched ... Are these satellites?

C. Kletzing: Yes, they are indeed.

J. Kjaer: When those go up, are you at NASA headquarters? The team will be onsite?

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C. Kletzing: Typically we like to see the rocket go up if we can. And actually often in the early part of the operations, we aren't doing a huge amount. We often wait to turn most of the instruments on. So there'll be sort of initial contact, and we're going to do something called ride share where we will be launched with other satellites. And so we don't know exactly who and what the order will be, but probably we aren't first. They'll first throw off the main satellite that we will ride with and then probably we will get put into orbit then. And you know sort of the first things are just making sure that the spacecraft is stable and things are behaving the way they should, and then gradually we turn things on.

C. Kletzing: And so for the turn on part we usually will head back to Iowa, which is where our science operations center is. And we'll monitor the instruments, because everything has to be done remotely anyway. When we're home we have all the resources that we need to analyze things and look at things. But the initial turn- on, which will be done through Millennium Space, which is handling us, for the contact stuff I'll probably stay there just to make sure we're up and operating and then then we'll all fly back here and spend a few weeks getting everything turned on.

J. Kjaer: And so then when you talk about the equipment, these things that you've built, are they essentially sort of complicated little computer software? The equipment that you've built, the stuff that is going to help you gather the data you need are these ... ?

C. Kletzing: Well there's a central computer in what we call our main electronics box, which we design and actually the guy that's doing it is at the University of New Hampshire, is also one of our partners. We're mostly building our sensors. And so we have sensors that can measure an electric field, sensors that can measure a magnetic field. We're going to look at the particles. We like to look at electrons. We look at the ions. We look at waves as well. And so all of those sensors get built and then integrated together into that one computer here, which controls everything. But most of what the instrument teams are building is an individual sensor. And then they sort of specify what their requirements are for how it has to be communicated with to operate. And so some of them have sort of what I would call very rudimentary computers, but the main computer is the central one that pulls the data, puts it into some format, gives it to the spacecraft to send to the ground.

J. Kjaer: Yeah. So how long are you expecting to have to work with the data once you get it? Is this a multi year process to figure out what all these sensors are sending back to the main computer?

C. Kletzing: Well, mission life is kind of an interesting thing. Right now we're looking at probably of the order of a year of mission life. We get lots of data, but typically we also plan for at least another year beyond that to work with the data and properly archive it. Being a NASA mission in the current environment, all the data is completely available to the public. Typically we get us sort of a buffer WorldCanvass - Research at Iowa (Part 1) (Completed 11/06/19) Page 5 of 9 Transcript by Rev.com

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period of three to six months to make sure that ... You know, we want to make sure that it's good, it's properly stored and things like that. But in my experience it's good to have the public involved, and primarily people in our scientific community, because they will find little things that you need to fix because they're trying to do something with it. And then they say, wait, this doesn't look quite right. And we try hard but it's easy to miss fine details.

C. Kletzing: And so we will probably work with that data for at least two years. But often if everything is still working, we go back to NASA and say, well, it's up there and it's still working and wouldn't you like to extend us for another year or two? And so that's quite common in these kinds of missions. For instance, our Van Allen Probes Mission has been operating for seven years now. It was designed for two. It will end actually next Monday because we've run out of fuel, and that's the way it goes. But you know, we've been doing good science. All the instruments have been working. And so NASA says, yeah, you know, that's a relatively small investment to work on the data versus building a whole new set of spacecraft. So we hope TRACERS will go for many years.

J. Kjaer: So can you help me understand what it is we're trying to learn about the magnetic fields around Earth and around the Sun?

C. Kletzing: Well, sort of the big picture goal of all of this is to understand what people often talk about as space weather. So you know, the environment of space, people are told it's a vacuum. People tend to think there's nothing there. And that's not true. There's just not very much. But it's a really big place. And so when you put a little bit of something in a really, really big place, you can start to have various effects. And so the Sun sends out a constant stream of particles called the solar wind. And the Earth has a big magnetic field that acts sort of like as a big buffer for us. And so when those two things interact, energy can get transferred from this solar wind into our local region of space that we call the magnetosphere. And understanding how all that behaves is actually pretty important.

C. Kletzing: And so much like terrestrial weather forecasting, we'd love to be able to do accurate forecasting of space weather because we know it affects things that humans do on the surface of the planet. For instance, back in 1989 there was a big coronal mass ejection coming from the Sun, a big chunk of matter. And you know looking out from the Sun, the Earth's a pretty small spec. So most of the time these things don't get very near us. This one pretty much caught us head on and caused a big, what we call geomagnetic storm. And that actually caused huge blackouts in Quebec because a power station overloaded. They basically blew up a substation and so forth. And so people were without power for quite some time. And so being able to predict when something like that is going to happen is actually of great interest.

C. Kletzing: And so the way TRACERS fits into this is this big question as I was talking earlier about, are things just spatially varying or are they also varying in time? It's something we don't know the answer to. So if we're going to try to build WorldCanvass - Research at Iowa (Part 1) (Completed 11/06/19) Page 6 of 9 Transcript by Rev.com

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models, and like the big weather models that they run to tell you a storm is coming tomorrow, we need to know the answer to a question like that. And so in the big picture, once we get that question answered, and we will do it for a variety of different conditions. So you know, it's sort of like looking and understanding what things will lean to rain tomorrow and what things don't. Then we can tell the people who do the big theoretical models, well, here's what the observations say, so if your model isn't doing this, it's not right and you've got to fix it.

C. Kletzing: And that way we will evolve over, many, many years to having a capability where we can start to say, you know what's coming is going to cause a big problem. And so the power stations need to be on alert that something might happen. And it can be even bigger. There was an event back in the 1800s called the Carrington Event that was big enough that telegraph wires started sparking. So you can imagine with all the electronics that we have today that that could be quite disruptive. And so there's concern of, you know, can we get to a point where we can predict something like that so at least we can protect key systems and things like that. So we are a small piece of that, but an important one that lets us know how we have to proceed forward with our modeling.

J. Kjaer: I mentioned before we went on the air that I used to work at a radio station and we would get a couple of times a year notices that there would be sunspot activity at a certain time and we should expect that transmissions would be interrupted. Now, I don't know if that sort of thing is the same sort of prediction that you might ... Would you expect at some point in the future that ...?

C. Kletzing: They all go together actually. And so those were be on the lookout for it, and it might happen. We'd like to get to is it's ... You know, what they didn't tell you is there's an 80% or a 20% chance that it was going to happen the next day. They just said it might. And so we'd like to get more like weather where you could say there's a 30% chance tomorrow of rain. We'd like to say, well, there's a 30% chance that that you're going to see this kind of event. So then you can plan in a way that kind of is an appropriate response. And when we can say there's a 100% chance, then you say, hey, I'm going to pay attention.

C. Kletzing: And already, even with the fairly primitive forecasting that we have, power companies particularly in the northern and southern latitudes as you get further north and further south, are quite interested in this stuff. I was in a meeting a couple of years ago in South Africa and there was one session all about these big currents that get induced and what they can do about solving those kinds of problems. So people are paying attention.

J. Kjaer: Well, so this is obviously your big project now and for the next few years. Do you have a head full of other exciting things you want to start to investigate?

C. Kletzing: Yeah, and even the data that we have from some of the existing projects, I have things that we're working on and models and stuff that we would like to do WorldCanvass - Research at Iowa (Part 1) (Completed 11/06/19) Page 7 of 9 Transcript by Rev.com

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further work with. So there's always unfortunately more ideas than there is time in the day. But yeah, for me, you know I'm getting towards the end of career. This may be the last really big thing that I do. But I'm also working with, like I said, some of our younger faculty are proposing missions further down the road. And so providing instruments for their missions and things like that as they move towards this PI class of leading the whole thing themselves. So that's kind of after this mission where I see myself more as a helping to facilitate that we still stay very active into the future.

J. Kjaer: Yeah, you can help me remember the specifics of this, but I'm sure that you'll know, and some of the audience will know, that a few years ago sounds from space were captured and utilized by a composer, Terry Riley, a contemporary classical composer. And so these space sounds, this was when Don Garnett was in the department, and Terry Riley composed something called Sun Rings, which was a really beautiful, really interesting performance piece that was premiered here at Hancher. And the sounds that had been captured from space were integrated into this piece and it was sort of very ... It was beautiful to watch. And very interesting. Some of the sounds were like 'whoosh' and some were little pops and beeps and things.

J. Kjaer: And so somebody sitting in the audience like me, I really had no idea how they got these sounds captured and so on. But they created this musical moment for a really inventive creator. And I read a little piece when I was getting ready for today's interview and this was from a review of Sun Rings and the author said, "... utilizing space recordings and scraps of poetry, the minimalist titan and his longtime collaborators grapple with humanity's place in the universe."

J. Kjaer: Is that what you're trying to do, grapple with humanity's place in the universe?

C. Kletzing: Well, I think it's certainly something that almost everybody has thought about at some point. When I'm doing science, I guess I'm more interested just in how stuff works. That's kind of my place in the universe anyway, of thinking about things like that. And the Sun Rings was also a written for my favorite modern quartet, the Kronos.

J. Kjaer: Me too.

C. Kletzing: And these sounds of space are quite interesting. We've actually made more recordings of these with the Van Allen Probes. Not all of the whole range of ones that were heard for Sun Rings. But it turns out that some of the waves that we see in space are in the same frequencies as human hearing. So you don't even really have to change anything about them. You just basically take the measurement and turn it into a sound file. And it was interesting when we first got these back from Van Allen Probes that people said, oh, these are so clear. And I kind of scratched my head because I've heard these things around our department since I joined. And then it dawned on me that Van Allen Probes actually has the most resolution. So we are the first CD quality sounds of space, WorldCanvass - Research at Iowa (Part 1) (Completed 11/06/19) Page 8 of 9 Transcript by Rev.com

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not that anybody remembers what a CD is anymore. And so that extra clarity comes through. So it was kind of interesting when people first started mentioning it to me because it never occurred to me that that would happen.

C. Kletzing: But there's always been quite a bit of interest in that stuff. And of course Don has measured things at many of the planets. So you get some different sounds depending upon where you are. And some of those do have to be translated in pitch so that you can put them into the human range. But the ones right around the Earth, we don't touch other than just to turn them into a sound file, and there's quite a variety of different things. About, oh, this was about three or four years ago Dan Moore, who's the percussion professor here, wrote a piece for a solo marimba and stereo, Sounds From the Van Allen Probes, which we did as part of, I forget, it was an artistic thing in the spring that he wrote that for. And that was pretty cool.

J. Kjaer: Yeah, yeah. Very fun. Well, gosh, I can't thank you enough for coming here to join us tonight and telling us about your research, and everything that has come before, and all the things that'll come in the future. It's really exciting. So Craig Kletzing, thank you. And I think that's it for this first segment of our program.

J. Kjaer: I hope you'll stay with us for part two where it we'll be discussing the effects of chemotherapy on brain function. WorldCanvass programming is available on iTunes, the public radio exchange, and the International Programs website. I'm Joan Kjaer for UI International Programs. Thank you for joining us.

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