Living With a Star: Science That Matters to People
Speaker: Madhulika Guhathakurta, Exploration Technology Directorate, NASA Ames Research Center
Presentation
Abstract
A hundred years ago, the Sun-Earth connection (the field of LWS research and space weather impacts) was of interest to only a small number of scientists. Solar activity had little effect on daily life. Today, a single strong solar flare could bring civilization to its knees. Modern society has come to depend on technologies sensitive to solar radiation and geomagnetic storms. Particularly vulnerable are intercontinental power grids, interplanetary robotic and human exploration, satellite operations and communications, and GPS navigation. These technologies are woven into the fabric of daily life, from health care and finance to basic utilities. Both short- and long-term forecasting models are urgently needed to mitigate the effects of solar storms and to anticipate their collective impact on aviation, astronaut safety, terrestrial climate and others. Even during a relatively weak solar maximum, the potential consequences that such events can have on society are too important to ignore. The challenges associated with space weather affect all developed and developing countries. Work on space weather specification, modeling, and forecasting has great societal benefit: It is basic research with a high public purpose and the stated goal of LWS/ILWS is to achieve the Sun-Earth, Sun-Planet system understanding. In this talk I will provide update on NASA’s efforts in addressing national and international efforts in addressing space weather scientific understanding.
Biography
Madhulika "Lika" Guhathakurta is the Lead Program Scientist for the Living With a Star Program at NASA headquarters in Washington, DC. LWS focuses on understanding and ultimately predicting solar variability and its diverse effects on Earth, human technology and astronauts in space. The systems science behind this new kind of weather outside of Earth’s terrestrial atmosphere is known as "Space Weather”. Guhathakurta also leads an international initiative known as the International Living With a Star that brings together all the space agencies of the world to contribute towards the scientific goal for Space Weather. In addition to leading science missions for the LWS program, she also manages a theory, modeling, and data analysis program to integrate scientific output, data, and models to generate a comprehensive systems understanding of Sun-Heliosphere-Planets coupling. She is the discipline scientist of this new discipline known as heliophysics. Guhathakurta has been a co-chair and now an active member on the inter-agency group Committee on Space Weather of the National Space Weather Program and NASA lead on the Space Weather Agenda item for UNCOPUOS. Education and outreach is another strong passion of Guhathakurta. To that effect, she has helped create graduate level text books in heliophysics. To popularize heliophysics, she has partnered with the American Museum of Natural History, NY, to produce two popular full dome planetarium shows that are being showed internationally and used by teachers to excite the next generation of space scientists. She also helped produce a 3D IMAX show utilizing the observations from the STEREO mission. Guhathakurta has worked as an educator, scientist, mission designer, directed and managed science programs, and has built instruments for spacecraft. She has been a co-investigator on five Spartan 201 missions aboard space shuttles (STS-56, STS-64, STS-69, STS-87, STS-95) to study the solar corona in white-light and UV radiation, and has authored over 70 publications. She is presently on detail to NASA Ames Research Center till January, 2016.