The Geospace environment comprises a complex system of interlaced domains that interacts with the incoming solar wind plasma flow and transfers its energy and momentum from the Earth's magnetosphere outer layers down to the ionosphere and upper atmosphere. These physical processes take place mainly on the Earth's dayside, diverting most of the energy along geomagnetic field lines toward both the northern and southern polar regions. Understanding this complex interaction process that couples both polar ionospheres is important for developing the physical models that can describe and predict space weather disturbances and help mitigate their impacts on humans' technological systems - from near-Earth space assets down to electrical grids and long pipelines. There is a strong need to collect sufficient geophysical data to investigate the above-mentioned processes, particularly from the southern hemisphere.
With this award, the grantees will build and deploy additional ground-based observations platforms in the East Antarctic Plateau, enhancing capabilities of the existing meridional array of already deployed autonomous, low-powered magnetometers. This will make the southern array of magnetometers two-dimensional and geomagnetically conjugate to similar instruments deployed in Greenland and Svalbard, thus making possible a global view of the magnetospheric regions where natural, ultra-low frequency electromagnetic waves are generated. The project involves young scientists who will operate remote Antarctic magnetometers and analyze collected data to investigate space weather events and validate models. This project expands the Virginia Tech's partnership with the University of New Hampshire, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Polar Research Institute of China, and Technical University of Denmark.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
