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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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Under the Weather: Space Weather. The Magnetic Field of the Heliosphere

Normally, only people in the far north can enjoy the dancing beauty of the aurora borealis; however, an intense collision of charged solar particles with the Earth's magnetic field can magnify the Northern Lights so much that they are visible in the southern United States. Behind the light show lies enough flux of energetic particles carried by solar wind to render our planet uninhabitable. The Earth's magnetic field, also known as the magnetosphere, is the only thing that shields us from the Sun. Even the magnetosphere cannot fully guard us from the wrath of the Sun. In March 1989, a powerful solar flare hit Earth with such energy that it burned out transformers in Quebec's electrical grid, plunging Quebec and the eastern United States into darkness for more than 9 hours. Northern lights and energy grid overloads are not the only ways that a solar wind can affect us. A solar storm in July 1999 interrupted radio broadcasts. Solar activity can disorient radars and satellite sensors, break up cell phone connections, and threaten the safety of astronauts. A large bombardment of solar particles can even reduce the amount of ozone in the upper atmosphere. Magnetohydrodynamics (MHD), the study of magnetic fields in magnetized plasmas, can help scientists predict, and therefore prepare for, the harmful side effects of solar weather in the magnetosphere.

Roberts, Aaron↗

Remote Sensing

Remote sensing is measuring something without touching it. Most methods measure a portion of the electro-magnetic spectrum using energy reflected from or emitted by a material. Moving the instrument away makes it easier to see more at one time. Airplanes are good but satellites are much better. Many things can not be easily measured on the scale of an individual person. Example - measuring all the vegetation growing at one time in even the smallest country. A satellite can see things over large areas repeatedly and in a consistent way. Data from the detector is reported as digital values for a grid that covers some portion of the Earth. Because it is digital and consistent a computer can extract information or enhance the data for a specific purpose.

Rickman, Douglas↗

Scalar Atomic Defect-Based Solid-State Self-calibrating Magnetometer (3SM) for Space Plasma Analysis

The Earth’s magnetosphere is a system of multiple, co-located particle populations interacting via plasma waves. Things to understand are driving processes, radiation belt and ring current issues, auroral physics, internal plasma processes, and magnetosphere-ionosphere mapping issues. These plasma-physics processes enable the Earth’s magnetosphere to evolve in response to temporal changes in the solar wind and they underlie the phenomena of space weather, which impacts spacecraft systems, astronauts, radio communications, and ground based electric-power grids. The objective of 3SM is to measure magnetic field strength and to calibrate the Vector Magnetometer (VM) device to maintain absolute accuracy during a mission. The 3SM features make the instrument preferably suited not only for the traditional role of scalar magnetometers as absolute references for the calibration of the on-board vector instruments, but also for extended operational capacities, such as higher frequency scalar measurements (of potential interest for magnetosphere studies for the low frequency part of the spectrum) or autonomous scalar / vector operations. Diamond has been the solid-state platform of choice for quantum device technologies for some time, however, it suffers from difficulties such as scalability, integration, and cost. While the diamond platform is very useful for quantum technologies, further development is needed to make it viable. The material platform of choice for NASA Glenn’s Quantum Sensing And Spin Physics (Q-SASP) is silicon carbide (SiC). This is due to the much higher industry development of the SiC material platform for high-power and high-temperature electronics. It leverages both the decades-long SiC development expertise and infrastructure at NASA Glenn and its growing capabilities in quantum metrology. To make SiC devices usable for quantum technologies such as quantum sources, a much deeper understanding of defects is needed. Q-SASP is developing quantum metrology capabilities to evaluate the energy structure, defect formation energy, band structure augmentation, generation/recombination rates, and limits of dipole-dipole coupling in non-metal implanted SiC devices. This can be achieved by analysis of zero-field splitting, low-field resonance, and singlet-triplet mixing through various forms of Electrically Detectable Magnetic Resonance (EDMR) and Near-Zero Field Magnetic Resonance (NZFMR) spectroscopy. This work will discuss recent system developments, device developments, computational modeling, and spectroscopy results and analysis of defects created by non-metal implantations in SiC devices. The defect formation energies of V Si ,V C , V C V Si , N C V Si , N Si , N C in 4H-SiC are previously reported values in other research [2]-[3]. The defect formation energies of PSi and PC were calculated in GPAW [fig 1A]. The basic underlying mechanism of the zero-field phenomenon is the mixing of singlet and triplet states [4]-[5]. In most spin-dependent transport, two electron spins are involved, and thus one must consider each of their interactions with the field. We investigated the electronic and magnetic properties of 4H-SiC and 6H-SiC. The defect formation energy helps us determine what types of defects we are observing in the SiC EDMR experiment. They have very low formation energy (it is negative). The phosphorus substitution in 4H-SiC is a very stable defect. The band diagrams provide us with vital information about how the electronic properties of SiC (such as band gap) change as we add non-metal defects. The zero-field splitting parameters allow us to study the inflection point in the NZFMR [fig 1B]. We clearly observed zero-field splitting. We also noted that the zero-field splitting remained constant with changing bias. We aspect it zero-field splitting to remain constant while the hyperfine and exchange interaction perturbations shift under the influence of an external magnetic field. This is the essence of quantum magnetometry and self-calibration.

space plasma↗