Space Cadets

Each of these students has a different story. Where he came from, what he researches, where he hopes to go after graduating. Like the planets in our solar system drawn to the sun’s gravity, each with its own history and orbit, these students were attracted to UTSA and the joint space physics Ph.D. program with the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI).

The program, which is designed to enhance collaborative efforts within the community, combines traditional classes with hands-on laboratory sessions where students build instruments that may one day fly in outer space.

For years, San Antonio was the only major city in the U.S. without a graduate program in physics—despite the fact the city housed a group of scientists whose instrumentation work was seen aboard a number of NASA spacecraft. In 2004, the University of Texas System Board of Regents approved the graduate program, and by fall 2005, classes had begun.

The SwRI scientists who would be teaching space physics courses were all given the title adjoint professor, which allows them to teach, supervise students, serve on committees and participate in all faculty activities related to the program.

Dave McComas, senior executive director of the Space Science and Engineering Division at SwRI, thinks that creating the joint program was a smart step for the university as it seeks to become research intensive. It is a win-win-win situation. UTSA gets the name and reputation of SwRI attached to the program, which helps draw students. SwRI gets to use graduate student help and encourage students to enter the field. Finally, students get instruction through traditional methods and a chance to experience life as a working scientist.

The partnership has allowed other areas within the physics Ph.D. program to expand. A total of 33 doctoral students specialize in a variety of research areas, including biophysics, nanostructures and optics. The five students profiled here are among the nine whose interests lie in outer space.

Joseph Westlake

It has been a bumpy ride for Joseph Westlake. The Michigan native changed his major from physics to engineering before settling with his original choice. He graduated from the University of Michigan, and when his adviser, Hunter Waite, came down to SwRI for a job, Westlake followed and enrolled in the physics program at UTSA.

Westlake and his wife, who was six months pregnant at the time, moved to Texas in the heat of July 2006. One of their cars broke down on the way and their house wasn’t ready to move into when they arrived. “It was challenging, but we can laugh about it now,” he says.

Westlake’s research centers on using mass spectrometers, instruments that measure mass and composition of molecules, to analyze the atmosphere around Titan, the largest moon orbiting Saturn. Titan’s thick atmosphere of complex organics has researchers comparing it to what Earth may have looked like more than a billion years ago.

Westlake arrived at his dissertation, titled “Advanced Mass Spectrometry Techniques for Future Missions to Titan,” after having worked on three phases of research. The first phase was observations from a spacecraft called Cassini that was launched in 2004 and sent to the Saturn system to learn about the planet and its 60 known moons. During the second phase, Westlake is analyzing the data, “trying to figure out what it means for the origin of Titan.” His final phase will be to develop an improved mass spectrometer for future missions to Titan or other moons in the Saturn system.

Graduate school has been a challenge for this father of a 2-year-old son, but he is glad things worked out this way. “Your path is your path is your path,” he says. “My weaving path defined what I like to do, and I don’t have any interest in being in a job I don’t like.”

He plans to defend his dissertation by spring 2010. Afterward he’ll look for a postdoctoral position at an instrument-based physics institution—preferably one outside of Texas. “Texas is very different from Ann Arbor,” he says. “We like our seasons.”

Tom Broiles

When he was in high school, Tom Broiles wanted to fly planes for the Air Force and even joined AFROTC at Texas State University. With no plans to attend graduate school, he heard from a friend that UTSA was starting a program in space physics. “Three of us drove down, took a tour of SwRI, and the calibration laboratory sold me. I saw it and said ‘I am coming here.’ I took the GRE a month later, and six months later I was here.” At the time, he had no idea that he would spend eight-hour nights in the laboratory, calibrating a set-for-flight space instrument.

Broiles works with 13 years of data from two spacecraft, Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) and Wind, to learn about the phenomena known as co-rotating interaction regions (CIRs), which occur in the magnetized plasma around the sun called the solar wind. Plasma is a state of matter consisting of freely floating electrons and ions.

CIRs form when a fast-moving solar wind pushes up behind the slower-moving wind ahead of it. A compression wave forms between the two streams of plasma because the magnetic field is nondivergent, but is dragged outward by the solar wind. This wave co-rotates with the sun and can be seen over several rotations. Broiles’ research is to identify the characteristics of CIRs in relation to speed, density, etc.

Just like the decision to attend graduate school, Broiles’ next step after graduation may be spontaneous. For aspiring scientists, he offers this advice: “Do not be afraid to look stupid. … Volunteer for the thing no one else wants to do. When you do it, you get a new perspective.” Oh, and “bring a sweater,” he says. “Sitting in the calibration laboratory at 3 a.m. is like camping in the fall.”

Rob Ebert

In 11th grade, Rob Ebert told his mom he never wanted to study science again. But then in college, an influential chemistry professor helped him change his mind. Now, Ebert is researching space science and approaching the defense of his doctoral dissertation. The first student to enroll in the joint space physics doctoral program, this University of Toronto graduate and his wife traveled from their home on Lake Erie in Canada to attend UTSA.

“I wanted to join two facets in doctoral [study]—theoretical and experimental. One of the leading places for that is SwRI,” he says.

Since entering the program in January 2006, Ebert has been involved in a number of projects with his adviser, Dave McComas, that target the solar wind and Jupiter’s magnetosphere. Specifically, he has been analyzing data and working with instrumentation to measure the plasma in those environments.

Three projects led up to his dissertation topic. The first involved analyzing solar wind data from a spacecraft called Ulysses, the first to orbit the sun’s poles.

Another major project for Ebert and McComas was IBEX (Interstellar Boundary Explorer), launched in summer 2008. From an Earth-based orbit, IBEX scans our solar system for neutral atoms created by interactions between solar wind plasma and atoms in the interstellar medium. By understanding the location and origin of these atoms, scientists can understand how this interstellar medium interacts with our solar system. Ebert was involved with calibrating the sensors on IBEX. He and five other students also worked on a class project based on one IBEX sensor. The students had to create a project based on the question: Is IBEX capable of identifying atoms of different mass? The project was highly successful and resulted in a published paper.

A third project Ebert was involved with, JADE (Jovian Auroral Distributions Experiment), contained a suite of instruments used to measure the electron and ion populations responsible for Jupiter’s aurora. Ebert’s contribution to JADE, a prototype that would measure magnetic fields lines, was cut from the mission set for launch in 2011. Although he was disappointed, Ebert learned that “not everything you work on will fly. It’s a good idea to work on multiple projects.”

His dissertation is titled “The Composition and Dynamics of the Low Energy Plasma in Jupiter’s Magnetotail” and uses data from the Solar Wind Around Pluto instrument on the New Horizons spacecraft, the first mission to Pluto. Although the spacecraft, which launched in 2006, has not yet reached Pluto, it has collected measurements from the magnetotail of Jupiter, an area of its magnetosphere that is stretched out away from the sun. Ebert explains that knowledge of this area will “help us discover where the plasma on the magnetotail came from, and understand the dynamics of Jupiter’s inner magnetosphere.”

Emmanuel Grotheer

Fairly new to the program, Emmanuel Grotheer has a unique heritage. A first-generation American born in El Paso, he grew up in the cool climate of his father’s home country of Germany.

He attended undergraduate school at the University of Pittsburgh and received degrees in both physics and architectural studies. He wanted to keep his options open, he says, and didn’t know which direction he’d choose. After graduating, he spent three years working in technical software support, and although he liked the work, was ready to go back to school.

“I didn’t want to design bathrooms,” he says with a laugh. “It is a common joke among entry-level architects, but it is the truth. Becoming a top architect is a lot like the path to becoming a medical doctor, maybe even longer. And I did not want to be an engineer; I wanted something with a little more freedom.” Being a scientist allows for much more creativity a lot sooner, he says. “I looked for a school all over the country, and was glad when I found UTSA because I could be near [my mother’s] family in Mexico. UTSA’s partnership with SwRI made it an easy choice.”

Grotheer began classes in fall 2007, and he has already had the opportunity to work on a number of projects. For the BepiColombo mission scheduled to go to Mercury in 2013, Grotheer worked on an instrument called Strofio. This instrument will sample neutral particles in Mercury’s exosphere-space, running them through a rotating electric field to determine the types of particles, based on their travel time inside Strofio. Unlike previous instruments flown to Mercury, Strofio has only one detector, allowing for greater mass resolution.

Strofio should help determine what particles are in Mercury’s exosphere. Previous missions detected only five types of particles, but after testing with radio waves from Earth, scientists determined the previous missions’ results account for less than 10 percent of the total exospheric pressure. Grotheer is helping on the second prototype of that instrument.

One of the best things about the program, he says, is that he is able to apply skills from various disciplines. In addition to learning complex space physics concepts, Grotheer has had to make circuits, create plumbing structures for vacuum pumps, and decipher the Interactive Data Language (IDL) program, which is used to analyze data received from space instruments.

Although graduation is not right around the corner, Grotheer has hopes of working for an instrument laboratory “somewhere with a cooler climate.” He has thought about the Advanced Physics Laboratory in Maryland or returning to Germany to work for a Max Planck Institute or the European Space Agency.

Josh Alquiza

A native Texan, Josh Alquiza grew up and went to college in his parents’ home country of the Philippines, but returned to the state to pursue his graduate studies at UTSA. What sold him on the program was the partnership with SwRI.

Alquiza has been in the program since classes began in fall 2005. The most interesting part of space science for him is the concept of space weather. He would love to be a part of the movement to predict phenomena as they occur in space. Like weather on Earth, space weather is defined by collisions and interactions of currents of matter. On Earth, the currents are made of air; in space they are made of plasma. These events happen quickly and on large scales, and have potential to have a huge effect on the surface of the Earth. For example, in 2003, a large solar flare caused aurora borealis, the northern lights, to be seen as far south as Florida.

Alquiza’s research uses data from the Two Wide-angle Imaging Neutral Atom Spectrometers (TWINS) mission. TWINS uses two identical instruments on different spacecraft to scan the magnetic field around the Earth and analyze the neutral atoms that are created by the collisions between ions. From the data, weather patterns can be recognized, understood and, hopefully, one day predicted.

Alquiza says the major advantage of studying at SwRI is working alongside scientists and seeing them in action. “They are really cool guys and willing to help you out,” he says. “If you’re stuck on a problem, the expert is just down the hall.”

He isn’t sure what his future holds, but because there are very few people with doctorates in physics in the Philippines, he would like to one day be able to give back to students in his country. “The nature of the country’s stability does not make it a good basis for science to grow. I would like to be a part of helping that out,” he says. “I do not know exactly how I would carry over my research, but it is at the back of my mind and in my heart.”