Mather is the senior project scientist emeritus involved in the development of the James Webb Space Telescope. “I thought it would be a fun little project and here I am one career later,” says Smith, who previously served as the program director for JWST. Smith was the second astronomer hired on the project by John Mather in 1996. To highlight some of the scientists and engineers that made key contributions to the project, Discover spoke to Eric Smith, the associate director for research in the Astrophysics Division and the program scientist for JWST. NASA operates the telescope jointly alongside the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency. ![]() Who exactly was involved in developing the science and technology behind the telescope and its operation? NASA says there are currently more than 1,200 scientists, engineers and technicians that work on the project from 14 countries, but many thousands more worked on its development. "This challenging experiment required a measurement of the very small population of electrons moving down the LPD chamber at nearly the same speed as the Alfven waves, numbering less than one in a thousand of the electrons in the plasma," Carter says.Read More: How the James Webb Space Telescope Takes Such Stunning Pictures The agreement of experiment, simulation, and modeling provides the first direct evidence that Alfven waves can produce accelerated electrons, causing the aurora, says Troy Carter, professor of physics at UCLA and director of the UCLA Plasma Science and Technology Institute. Through numerical simulations and mathematical modeling, the researchers demonstrated that the results of their experiment agreed with the predicted signature for Landau damping. The phenomenon of electrons "surfing" on the electric field of a wave is a theoretical process known as Landau damping, first proposed by Russian physicist Lev Landau in 1946. "These experiments let us make the key measurements that show that the space measurements and theory do, indeed, explain a major way in which the aurora are created." "The idea that these waves can energize the electrons that create the aurora goes back more than four decades, but this is the first time we've been able to confirm definitively that it works," says Craig Kletzing, professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Iowa and a study co-author. Department of Energy and National Science Foundation. The physicists were able to find confirmatory evidence in a series of experiments conducted at the Large Plasma Device (LPD) in UCLA's Basic Plasma Science Facility, a national collaborative research facility supported jointly by the U.S. ![]() These excited molecules relax by emitting light, producing the colorful hues of the aurora. Scientists have known that energized particles that emanate from the sun-such as electrons racing at approximately 45 million miles per hour-precipitate along the Earth's magnetic field lines into the upper atmosphere, where they collide with oxygen and nitrogen molecules, kicking them into an excited state. ![]() "Measurements revealed this small population of electrons undergoes 'resonant acceleration' by the Alfven wave's electric field, similar to a surfer catching a wave and being continually accelerated as the surfer moves along with the wave," says Greg Howes, associate professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Iowa and study co-author. The study, published online June 7 in the journal Nature Communications, concludes a decades-long quest to demonstrate experimentally the physical mechanisms for the acceleration of electrons by Alfven waves under conditions corresponding to Earth's auroral magnetosphere. The phenomena, known as Alfven waves, accelerate electrons toward Earth, causing the particles to produce the familiar atmospheric light show. In a new study, a team of physicists led by University of Iowa reports definitive evidence that the most brilliant auroras are produced by powerful electromagnetic waves during geomagnetic storms.
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