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| INSTITUTET FÖR RYMDFYSIK | UPPSALA |
 |
|
| Swedish Institute of Space Physics | (59°50.272′N, 17°38.786′E) |
Project work
suggestions / Examensarbeten (30 hp)
Suggestions for
Rosetta student projects
Student: you,
perhaps?Supervisor: Anders Eriksson
Background
We fly a kind of "space weather station" known as a Langmuir probe (LAP) on ESA's Rosetta spacecraft, launched in 2004 for arrival at comet Churyomov-Gerasimenko in 2014. Some of our goals are to understand the plasma processes around the comet, and to link the nucleus properties to the plasma environment. Though there are several year before we reach the comet, there are data to analyze, science to understand and planning to do. We have gathered data during flybys of the Earth (2005, 2007 and 2009), Mars (2007), the asteroids Steins (2008) and Lutetia (2010) and at a few other instances. But what we really look forward to of course is the comet!We are one of the core teams in the international collaboration known as the Rosetta Plasma Consortium (RPC), the other teams being located in in Braunschweig, Kiruna, London, Orléans, and San Antonio. Projects can therefore sometimes include a visit at one of these places, for anything from a week to several months, depending on circumstances and what you want.
Project suggestions
Details of the project will depend on
your interests and skills, and on what is suitable at the time you turn
up. Here are a few possibility sketches, to set ideas in motion. Do you
have any own ideas for what to do? Come and discuss them!
- Comet plasma model. A research team organized by the International Space Science Institute in Bern have compiled a joint comet model, from the nucleus to the coma, which is available for testing. This is of high interest to us, as it offers a tool for operations planning and a baseline expectation for what we can see. A first project on this was done in 2009, but since then there as been new simulations and a very much altered trajectory strategy, so further work is needed. This means numerically flying Rosetta through the comet environment model and see what we can expect our measurements to look like, to find out what measurement modes that may be most useful.
- Flyby data. More can be
done on our data from the Earth, Mars and asteroid flybys, particularly
on the science side. Our data can be compared to other spacecraft data
and to ground observations, to find out the physics in the solar wind
and magnetosphere. The work would could partly be done at one of our
RPC partners.
Contact
![[Rosetta]](http://www.space.irfu.se/rosetta/ros_lap.gif)
ESA's comet hunter Rosetta, with the two Langmuir probes from IRF Uppsala at the end of the booms protruding from the spacecraft. Each probe is a sphere of 50 mm diameter.