Se invita a los interesados a participar del seminario “NASA’s Geospace Dynamics Constellation: Exploring our Connected Atmosphere”, que se llevará a cabo el miércoles 27 septiembre, a las 10:30 hs, en la Sala de Medios Audiovisuales, Block 3, 1er Piso, FACET-UNT. El mismo estará a cargo del Dr. Doug Rowland, de NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.
La disertación será en idioma Inglés.
The world relies on satellites in low earth orbit (LEO) for a wide range of commercial, civil space, and defense applications. Though LEO was one of the first space environments studied from the dawn of the space age, increased usage of this region has highlighted large gaps in our understanding and predictive capability. For example, following a SpaceX launch of 49 Starlink satellites in February 2022, 38 of those satellites were lost to unexpectedly high atmospheric drag that ultimately caused them to deorbit. In this region, Earth’s atmophere extends to form a tenuous envelope of electrically neutral gas called the thermosphere, and its electrically conductive counterpart, the ionosphere. These two layers of the upper atmosphere coexist over the same altitude range, and this has dramatic consequences for the variability of the LEO space environment. The coupled plasma-gas system responds to electrodynamic, dynamical, and chemical/photochemical forcing, at a range of spatial scales from sub-kilometer to global and time scales from seconds to decades.
