How did UNH become a space-weather hotbed?

I posted the press release about the latest NASA award to UNH last week. This is my follow-up column in the Monitor.

New Hampshire is known for a lot of things: Mt. Washington, the presidential primary, our slightly alarming motto. And then there’s heliophysics expertise.

“I checked and in the last 30 years we have been the lead on at least 22 NASA or NOAA missions” usually related to watching the solar wind, said Harlan Spence, director of the Institute for the Study of Earth, Ocean and Space at UNH. “It’s kind of unprecedented on a national scale, particularly for a university that’s as small as UNH.”

All of New Hampshire and the region should consider this a point of pride, but we’re better known in other parts of the country than we are in our own backyard.”

Significantly, he added, this success isn’t due to one superstar prof with a buddy at NASA skewing the data: “Ten different faculty members have been principal investigators” over the years, he said, and the school has succeeded under all of NASA’s science mission directors.

This work comes through the school’s Space Science Center, which is part of the Institute for Earth, Oceans and Space. That institute includes some 300 people – faculty, staff, students both graduate and undergraduate – and typically receives 40% to 50% of all externally funded research at UNH, Spence said. The Space Center gets about half of that, which is around $30 to $40 million a year.

“Right now there are a whole bunch of projects in various stages, some almost ready for launch, others being planned, with literally dozens in orbit,” he said.

Spence gathered all this data at my request. I had received a press release concerning a $24.3 million NASA contract to UNH for solar wind sensors and it struck me that I had been reading similar releases for years. UNH seems to be constantly building equipment that goes into space to measure or analyze radiation spewed out by the sun that interacts with our planet’s magnetic field.

They build lots of other space instruments, too, but the space-weather angle really stuck out. This is a field that was intellectually interesting for decades but has become vital now that we’re dependent on GPS and other satellite-based systems. A solar storm that knocks out satellites, or even interferes with the electricity grid, would cause chaos. So the more we know, the better.

Nonetheless, heliophysics (Helios was the ancient Greek god of the sun) seems a weirdly specific R&D target for a relatively minor research university. I had to wonder, how did that come about?

Spence said it really dates back to the founding of NASA in the late 1950s. “They established partnerships with many universities across the country, strategically located,” Spence said.

This was done partly to maximize the use of America’s far-flung academic resources and partly to spread the scientific wealth from the new Space Age, but also to maximize the number of people in Congress who would support funding for NASA in subsequent years. The Defense Department does the same thing.

UNH researchers were eager to be part of this fascinating new field and as a land-grant university with emphasis on practical research, they soon got contracts for building scientific instruments. Over the years as NASA has expanded its need for information gathering, that expertise has built on itself.

“Success breeds future success. When you have an instrument you have developed and flown, shown that it can perform, then it’s easier to tweak that heritage design, to improve it, maybe meet a new requirement … than develop it from scratch,” he said.

“For the most part we respond to RFPs (request-for-proposals) from different agencies. Typically they’re broadly interested in measurements and are agnostic about how those measurements are to be made – that’s where the competitive process comes in,” Spence said. Waiting for a yes-or-no on your proposal can take a year or more, he said; patience isn’t just a virtue for researchers, it’s a requirement.

Aside from historical success, Spence said UNH has a history of being open to partnerships with other research institutions, sharing expertise and money. This is increasingly important as scientific and technical knowledge becomes more detailed and complex. “We’re good and agile at finding partners who can help us and also at being a partner to somebody else.”

I have a hunch that UNH’s size helps here: If it was a giant like Caltech or Harvard it might be less inclined to reach outside its own walls.

The school’s practical background is also beneficial. “We use our machine shop heavily with two senior machinists. We do shop some parts out but having that in-house capability helps,” Spence said. “A mechanical engineer can to work hand-in-hand with a machinist who says ‘That’s a great drawing but I can’t really build it.’”

If you’re interested you can keep track at the new Space Tech Hub, which has gathered together information of all the various space science and research work in the university, including information about regional companies that are part of the mix.

And think about it every time you use GPS. Having somebody keep track of the weather is nice, but keeping track of the space weather might be nicer.