We are seeking students interested in doing research. The student should be at the junior or senior undergraduate level.

NOTE: This project is for the research experience only and does not have a salary. However, academic credit can be arranged for this work.

The solar wind is now known to have an organization of latitudinal structure in terms of speed, density, and variability. The solar-minimum picture, valid for much of the solar cycle, consists of a fast, low-density, and steady solar wind in the polar region and a slow, high-density, highly variable solar wind in the equatorial region, which also contains the heliospheric current sheet.

These properties are reflected in cometary images. We look at the comet’s appearance, tail orientation, and the occurrence of disconnection events (DEs, when the entire plasma tail comes off the comet). Documented images clearly showing the plasma tails can be analyzed to help determine the speed of the solar wind. We use a program called Comet6 that was running in summer 2002. We need to review the program and see if improvements are needed. The procedure involves using star chart programs to identify two stars on the image. With the positions of these two stars and simple measurements of length and angle on the image, the program calculates the quantities of interest including the position angle of the plasma tail and the distance of tail features from the head. Most of the steps are straightforward, but the identification of the star fields requires some skill and judgement.

The sun passed solar maximum approximately a year ago and the organization of the solar wind near solar maximum was essentially chaotic. In the summer of 2002, we studied comets LINEAR (C/2000 WM1) and Ikeya-Zhang (C/2002 C1) which were bright enough to be imaged in late 2001 and early 2002. This research was published in Proceedings of the Conference Asteroids, Comets, Meteors (ACM 2002), ESA SP-500, pp. 557-562. The student research assistants participating in the project were authors on the paper.

The solar wind has not returned to its solar minimum configuration. This summer we plan to analyze images of comets NEAT (C/2002 V1) and Kudo-Fujikawa (C/2002 X5). The University of New Mexico part of the project will be supervised by J. Brandt (P&A Room 170: jbrandt@as.unm.edu) and S. Gregory (Room 172). The lead scientist for the project is G. Jones, Imperial College, London, along with NASA-Jet Propulsion Laboratory.