Recent Publications & News
2012
A new study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research by Joo Hwang (GPHI) has been highlighted as a top story by 
European Space Agency (ESA Cluster story) and NASA Heliopress Highlights on October 24, 2012. This study based on data from European Space Agency’s Cluster mission shows that it is easier for the solar wind to penetrate Earth’s magnetic environment, the magnetosphere, than had previously been thought. Scientists from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. have, for the first time, directly observed the presence of certain waves in the solar wind—called Kelvin-Helmholtz waves that can help transfer energy into near-Earth space—under circumstances when previous theories predicted they were not expected.
Tim Stubbs (CRESST) and Yongli Wang (GPHI) published a note in Icarus about their modeling work for the Asteroid 4 Vesta where they predict the average illumination conditions and surface temperatures and assessed whether water ice could be preserved in the subsurface regolith over billions of years. Their results suggest that water ice could survive in the top few meters of the vestal regolith on such a time scale just in time for the
Dawn mission, currently at Vesta with appropriate instrumentation, to test this prediction. In addition to the Icarus article, NASA published a web feature Vesta Likely Cold and Dark Enough for Ice about their results.
2011
GPHI faculty were interviewed by a UMBC science writer Anthony Lane for an article on heliophysics research published in the UMBC Magazine Fall 2011 issue’s article titled Today’s Forecast: Stellar.
Keith Strong (Code 670) was interviewed via several phone calls and emails by Myriam Detruy of the France’s leading astronomy and space magazine Ciel et Espace about the solar cycle.