University Daily Kansan, August 31, 1981 Page 3
Voyager data stored at KU
By SHARON APPELBAUM Staff Reporter
As Voyager II travels farther into the solar system, a library of magnetic tapes in the basement of Malott Hall grows.
The connection is Thomas Armstrong, a KU professor of physics and astronomy, who, with a team of seven students, prepares a partner to study magnetic particles in spaghetti.
Voyager, a one-ton robot explorer, was launched in 1977 to study most of the planets in the solar system beyond Mars. Armstrong helped design and build one of the 11 experiments aboard the probe. Information is transmitted back to Earth and stored on the magnetic tapes.
ARMSTRONG and his co-workers have been toiling over their experiment, called Low-Energy Charged Particles, LECP, since 1972, when they first applied for the grant from the National Onautic and Space Administration.
The apparatus the team developed measures the number and type of charged atoms zipping along the solar system. Armstrong said the study of those particles helped in the understanding of Earth's magnetic radiation.
"All characteristics of the natural environment are related to one another," he said Friday. "In trying to understand how it all works, we gain a tremendous amount by looking at other planets."
Armstrong, a 1982 KU graduate, met his team of scientists as a graduate student at the University of Iowa, where he received his doctorate in 1966.
"Space physics was a very big deal at the University of Iowa," he said. "There were a lot of very involved students, and our professor, Dr. Sputnik and early Kennedy. The people studying there then are now the space physicists around the country."
WHEN ONE OF Armstrong's fellow students proposed the experiment in the early 1970s, Armstrong was included.
"I guess it was the 'good-old-boy' network," he said.
He added, however, that not all his research team was composed of Iowa graduates. For example, one scientist is German.
Armstrong's job was to organize and interpret the data, so he received all the magnetic tapes. Other members served only as the theists, he said.
The team is using the data to study Earth's climatic changes in particular he said. Scientists already know that warming can harm the sun affected the weather, he said.
FOR EXAMPLE, when the sun is disturbed, it emits an abundance of particles that are drawn to the Earth's poles by the magnetic field. That radiation warms the poles and changes thelet stream.
"It has consequences for precipitation, temperature and air pressure," armstrong explained.
"We expect to rather directly apply our experiment to the Earth, to have a
complete understanding of how the Earth interacts with the sun."
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Data for these studies is collected by a box attached to the space probe, measuring eight inches square at the base and 12 inches high, Armstrong said. The box contains tiny bits of silicon stacked like dimes. Each time a charged particle strikes the silicon, an electrical impulse is released. The signal is amplified inside Voyager and transmitted back to Earth.
But, Armström added, "There's a great deal more to Voyager's studies than just weather. It's part of the progress of basic science, to enlarge our understanding of how the solar system works."
Arnastroud said those signals could conceivably, in whole, unlock its speed and the place it came from.
At this point, Armstrong comes into the picture. Those tapes, now numbering more than 1,000, are sent to him and kept in cases in Malott Hall.
THE SIGNAL traveled for an hour and 26 minutes, he said, until it was picked up by one of three antennas placed in California, Spain and Australia. Those locations were equally spaced around the world so that "the
The signal is then broadcast to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., where it is recorded in computer code on magnetic tapes.
He said each tape contained 20 million characters, or the equivalent of 10 million words.
spacecraft is always above the horizon some place," Armstrong said.
Armstrong hopes to continue studying planets' particles. Voyager would reach Uranus in 1986, and although no definite plans had been made, Armstrong hopes the voyager will be able to where magnetic particles would be found. Neptune would be reached in 1989, he said.
In the meantime, he and his team are also working on a similar experiment for Galileo, a probe to be launched in 1986 that will orbit Jupiter.
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Thomas Armstrong
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