The award is for myself and 3 Co-I's (located at APL, SwRI, and University of Alabama Huntsville) to investigate the 'seed' particles, also called suprathermal particles. Seed particles are the particles that are accelerated most efficiently in shocks. When coronal mass ejections come off the sun they are often accompanied by shocks, and these shocks pick up the particles hanging around in the near-Sun environment and accelerate them up to high energies. It's not just coronal mass ejections that accelerate particles but other solar wind interaction mechanisms, such as stream interaction regions too.

Beginning around the time of the Space Age, a trove of researchers at the University of Iowa have asked the right scientific questions and, as a result, launched the first successful U.S. spacecraft, discovered the Earth's radiation belts, gotten an up-close glimpse of interstellar space and explained the phenomena of the Northern Lights, among many other milestones.

Dale Stille, instructional services specialist in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, was a presenter in a physics demonstration held in conjunction with the American Association of Physics Teachers Summer Meeting July 31- Aug. 4.

Congratulations to Dr. Cassandra Bogh who successfully defended her PhD thesis August 4th!

We kicked off our New Graduate Student Orientation today. We have a great incoming class and we're excited to see what great things you all will be doing in the years to come!