This transcript was exported on Nov 11, 2019 - view latest version here. 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 This transcript was exported on Nov 11, 2019 - view latest version here. 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 This transcript was exported on Nov 11, 2019 - view latest version here. 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.