The PAM Talks
Transcript: Dr. Laura Mazzino
Dr. Laura Mazzino - Measuring Space Weather
Dr. Laura Mazzino: But the one thing that I want to do is be persistent in my dreams, and I would like to encourage anybody that no matter what is your age, or what is your situation, no matter where you are in the world, listening to this podcast, reach out to people that will be able to help you and give you advice on the different opportunities for you to reach your dreams.
Ciara Chisholm: Hello, everyone, and thank you all so much for joining us on the PAM Talks today. My name is Ciara Chisholm and I will be your host for this episode. I'm a second year master's student studying astrophysics at the University of Calgary.
The PAM Talks is a podcast showcasing the voices of researchers who are part of traditionally underrepresented groups in physics and astronomy. Each episode, we interview a new physics and astronomy mentor, exploring the universe through the lens of diversity. Today, I am so excited to introduce you to Dr. Laura Mazzino, who is a professor here at the University of Calgary and personally one of my favorite professors. She studies space physics.
Space physics is a field of science that studies the sun, the solar wind, the heliosphere, and the planetary magnetospheres and upper atmospheres within the solar system. Dr. Mazzino's journey through the realm of space physics has taken her from her childhood home in Argentina to NASA and now to the University of Calgary. This is the PAM Talks, where the universe is as diverse as the minds unraveling its mysteries. Coming up next, my interview with Dr. Mazzino.
CC: Dr. Mazzino, would you like to introduce yourself?
LM: It's lovely to be here with you today. I'm very excited. I'm Dr. Laura Mazzino. I am an Assistant Professor in the Teaching Stream at the University of Calgary, and my background is in space physics.
CC: So you were originally from Argentina, right?
LM: Yes, I was born and raised in Buenos Aires to a very humble family. My childhood, it was very difficult because of this humble origins. And for me, working at NASA was a very, very far shot dream.
And my father took me to the planetarium of Buenos Aires when I was eight, and that's when my dream to work at NASA was born and to do space physics. So when I got to go to the NASA facilities to test the different payloads for the high altitude balloon payload program and others, it was amazing. I couldn't believe it that I had made it.
CC: So inspiring to know that there are people out there who despite all odds, do manage to make their dreams come true.
LM: Yeah, it was a long road, Ciara. I'm not going to lie to you. I grew up with shelter insecurity and food insecurity. So I rely on doing well in the school to get scholarships to be able to finish high school. My parents actually didn't finish middle school, both of my parents. So I was the second in my family after my brother to finish high school.
So there were not big expectations in terms of academics. When I graduated from high school, I did not have the means to study any place in the world. At that time, Argentina didn't have a space physics program. So it was practically impossible to access a university that will teach space physics.
The one thing that Argentina has, they have a special university for teachers. So by 19, I was an elementary school teacher in Argentina, finishing the university for teachers program. And I saved money for about nine years to go to the United States to start my bachelor's in physics when I was 28 years old. And I finished my PhD at 41 years old, which it is like very late in life if you think about it.
But the one thing that I want to do is be persistent in my dreams. And I would like to encourage anybody that no matter what is your age or what is your situation, hold on to your dreams and yeah, keep on going. I, personally, I'm very thankful and grateful to all the people that help me, especially the people in the universities and at NASA. Every time I reach out and I ask people, how would I do this to be able to achieve my dreams?
Everybody was super, super, super supportive and they gave me great practical advice that helped me to go to the next step. So coming out of my bachelor’s back in 2005, I reached out to a professor that had contacts with people in NASA. So I gave him my resume and I got a big rejection from the person from NASA, an email that says she has great academic achievements, but her programming skills are very weak.
And at that time, I didn't know that in order to succeed in space physics, you do have to have amazing programming skills. So even though it was a rejection, actually the feedback sent by this person was very helpful because at that time I knew that if I wanted to go into space physics and work one day for NASA, I needed to improve my programming skills. And I put hands to work and I took care of that right away. And so on, people will give you practical advice thinking, well, why don't you try this first on developing the skills, the soft and hard skills?
CC: Definitely. I mean, I think getting those practical advice is really important because I for one didn't realize when I first started my undergraduate degree that coding and being able to program was so important to the field of physics. Like there are things like that, that no matter what your degree you're looking for, from the outside, you might not know that that's an important skill to develop.
LM: So as an elementary school teacher, I'm a huge advocate to teach coding in the same level than literacy, as in reading literacy and math literacy. I think that right now, before it was important to know math and reading, right? And writing. Now it's reading, writing, math and coding.
I'm excited to see the schools are getting traction into teaching younger children from grade one how to code. Having said that, I think that we have to step it up as a society where my son started coding when he was six years old, because I introduced him to the field of coding. By 10 years old, he was very good at Java, and he started coding in Python. So I think like you said, people don't realize how important it is to know coding on all aspects of life.
CC: Yeah, for sure. It's definitely becoming a much more prevalent skill that is required in all fields, for sure.
LM: Yeah, I would like to encourage people to reach out. I used to have a web page, and I got requests from all over the world for advice on how to go into space physics. I have the story of a gentleman that messaged me from Nigeria, and he put his phone number, and I didn't know if this was for real or not.
So I called him, and he was for real. He was a master's student, and he really wanted to go into space physics, but he didn't know how. So I sent him a whole email on the different types of scholarships that he can access on different institutions around the world.
So long story short, he just finished two years ago, his PhD in space physics in the UK, met his soul mate in the program, who is an astrophysicist. They got married recently, and his whole life changed by reaching out to somebody that can give you some advice on how to start. Sometimes life is challenging.
No matter where you are in the world, listening to this podcast, you will have your own situation. Reach out to people that will be able to help you and give you advice on the different opportunities for you to reach your dreams.
CC: Yeah, I think reaching out and asking for advice is definitely one of the most important things we can do. If we don't know where to start, that can give you the first step. So I know that astronomy or astrophysics is different from space physics, but could you expand for those of us who don't exactly know the difference?
LM: Yeah, the study of space physics is the study of the environment between the Sun and the Earth and the planets within the solar system. And astronomy studies the constellations and the stars farther away in the galaxies and in deeper space. The space physicists, we focus on plasma in the space environments, the space weather that these planets might have, and the interaction of the plasma waves in this space.
CC: So there's a big difference there. One is looking at how the sun interacts more so with our planets, and astronomy more so looks at all the things that are much farther away, like stars and galaxies. And you mentioned something about space weather. What exactly is that?
LM: Yeah, space weather studies the interaction of the solar wind coming from the sun and how that solar wind might affect the space surrounding the planets, all the planets in the solar system, and what is the effects that this phenomena has on the atmospheres of these planets.
CC: And just for those who aren't quite as familiar with astronomy and physics in general, could you describe what the solar wind is? It's the particles that are blown off the sun, right?
LM: That's right. The sun is a star and it has a magnetic field. The magnetic field of the sun is very complex. There is an 11-year solar cycle that comes from this activity in the sun's magnetic field. And depending if we are in the solar maximum or solar minimum of this solar cycle, the sun is a little bit more active in the solar maximum.
So what happens is that when the sun is active in the solar maximum, these solar storms get more frequent and they produce more high-energy particles that travel through the solar wind to impact different atmospheres in the planet. So we see auroras in Jupiter as well as the Earth.
For example, Mars has a very weak magnetic field, so we don't see that much interaction. One of the speculations is that perhaps Mars, if it had a stronger magnetic field, it will be more Earth-like. The problem is that this solar wind is blowing out any Earth-like atmosphere that Mars could have had because it didn't have the protection of a strong magnetic field like the Earth.
CC: Yes, you could almost say that the magnetic field is like a visor to catch the spit from the sun, I suppose.
LM: Absolutely, absolutely. It's like a windshield. You know when you go in your car and you're driving in a dirty road and your windshield is going to catch all this dust particles that are coming towards you, right?
So the Earth's magnetic field acts like this bubble that will protect us from those high speed particles that come from the sun. So the magnetic field of the Earth, it can be seen as a dipole that looks like a butterfly, but because of this influx of solar wind, it gets compressed in the day side, which is the part of the Earth that is facing the Sun. And it gets stretched like a big tail, like a tail of a comet in the night side, which is the part of the Earth that is facing away from, it's facing away from the Sun.
So what happened is that there is a phenomenon called reconnection in the tail of the magnetic field of the Earth, where the solar particles actually can penetrate into the magnetic field of the Earth, producing all kinds of very interesting phenomena for me in terms of plasma waves. And some of them, they create the auroras. This is an area of expertise of other people in our department that is studying substorms on auroras.
CC: That's really interesting that the auroras, at least in some part, created by the solar wind and the Earth's magnetic fields, sort of channeling them to the Earth.
LM: So if we go back to the analogy of the driving in a car in a dirty road, imagine that you have a window in the back that is open and all these particles are coming from the back. So particles coming in the solar wind, they get to penetrate into our magnetic field, and what happens is that they get deflected. And the electrons and protons are going to get deflected in different directions because protons are ions are positive and electrons are negative.
So they are going to be deflected in opposite directions, which creates something called the ring current. And when the ring current gets enhanced, then the particles that were trapped in the magnetosphere before, they get accelerated, and now these particles can precipitate into the atmosphere, producing the Aurora Borealis.
One of the things that I think that has now been exploited is harvesting the energy that is stored in the Earth's magnetic field. The Earth's magnetic field is filled with these high-energy particles, and there is a lot of energy that is stored in the earth's magnetic field. The earth's magnetic field is the largest and most natural particle accelerator.
The particle accelerators that we have in physics, right? Fermilab, think about the one, LHC in Switzerland, they were created because we discovered this acceleration of particles in the magnetosphere back in 1950s and 60s with the discovery of the Van Allen radiation belts in 1957. So what happens is that at some point, we're going to learn as a humanity how to harvest this natural energy that we have in this natural particle accelerator that is our magnetosphere. And we can harvest that energy for energy consumption here on Earth.
CC: Would be fantastic. It sounds like space physics has a tie to so many different fields that I would have never expected.
LM: Yeah, it does connect with many, many different fields.
CC: That's really fascinating. You had said something as well about geomagnetic storms. Could you expand on what those are exactly?
LM: Yeah, so the Sun, like I said, speeds particles all the time. This is called the solar wind. And sometimes, depending on these coronal ejections, there are perturbations in the Sun's surface. Particles are ejected at a higher speed. These particles slam into the bubble that we have. Our Earth’s magnetic field, we call it the magnetosphere.
And when there is this compression, this ring current that I was telling you about gets enhanced. So the particles are trapped. Now they can move towards the Earth. So these geomagnetic storms, there are perturbations on the particles in Earth’s magnetic field that produce all kinds of interesting and some of them hazardous effects on our planet, right? In our life.
I know a lot of people know that yeah, these geomagnetic storms have the potential to perturb our life and certain things, like for example, there was a big geomagnetic storm that occurred late in 1800s and when this geomagnetic storm affected the Earth, the auroras were seen in Mexico and the telegraph lines caught on fire.
So this was the largest geomagnetic storm recorded in history and we call this the Carrington geomagnetic storm because Carrington was an amateur astronomer and he was the first one that made the connection with the solar flare that he saw in his telescope on the Sun and then two days later, he saw these effects on Earth with the telegraph lines catching on fire.
CC: That's a little scary, not gonna lie. I didn't know that the Sun could be quite so hazardous to the Earth. So there was that one event, but that was obviously back when we didn't have quite as much technology. If we had another event similar to the Carrington event, how would that impact us today? Would that shut down our entire power grid?
LM: If we had a Carrington Event nowadays, it would be devastating for our technology. One of the effects that these geomagnetic storms is satellite charging. So if we had a Carrington Event, a lot, if not most of our satellites might be disturbed and even damaged. So imagine all our satellites for internet or telecommunications might be wiped out by a Carrington Event.
Another thing is that we have a large power grid, which we depend on. There was a severe geomagnetic storm for current standards that happened in the 1980s. And this geomagnetic storm damaged the power grid in Northeast Canada because these geomagnetic storms produced currents in the generators and blew the transformers. So you had half of Canada and half of the United States without power for hours due to these geomagnetic storms.
So there is a lot of interest in studying the space weather so we can predict these geomagnetic storms and we can try to plan. Have a plan B on how can we protect our technology such that if a Carrington Event happens nowadays, we can still survive and still function as a society.
CC: Yeah, well hopefully that doesn't happen anytime soon, but I'm so glad there's people studying it and how to prevent it. Because it sounds like the solar wind and the geomagnetic storms can affect everything from satellites, which is everything from your cell phone to I'm sure there's many far-reaching implications of all the satellites going down that I can't think of right now.
LM: Well, think about the astronauts in the International Space Station, for example. So when you have an astronaut that, even if it is in your Earth orbit, they would receive this radiation, right? So it will be very hazardous for astronauts in space.
We also have something called polar flights when we have airplanes going over the North Pole. So if there is a geomagnetic storm, now everybody in the plane and especially the pilots who are exposed to more radiation, they will receive a higher dose of radiation. And this is the reason the pilots carry a dosimeter so they can collect this data on how much radiation is coming when they are flying. There are all different kinds of effects on our Earth and our life here on our planet that is affected by the geomagnetic storms.
CC: So clearly it's very important for us to be studying this area. It affects everyone. It's sort of an invisible string that kind of connects us all together. Let's maybe talk a little bit more about your research. Is there like a specific area of research in space physics that you study?
LM: Yes, of course. So the study of space physics is very broad and studies all the space between the Sun and the planets and all these tiny particles, ions and electrons and how they interact with different planetary environments. Between there, you have different plasma waves.
I analyze the solar wind more specifically, a type of wave that is called ultra-low frequency waves in the range of 0.5 to 5 millihertz. I also analyze how this plasma waves in the solar wind produce something called field line resonances on Earth's magnetic field. The field line resonance in the magnetic field is a plasma string. Imagine this as the string of a guitar. I'm a musician and I play guitar. So when you have a string that is fixing both points, you have something called a standing wave.
So what happens is that you have this field line resonances in Earth's magnetic field that are standing plasma waves that get excited by this plasma waves coming from the solar wind. So my research on how many of this ultra-low frequency field line resonances on Earth are produced directly by this ultra-low frequency waves coming from the solar waves. So the point of this poetically will be how the sun plays music with Earth, how the Sun is exciting the strings on Earth.
CC: Well, that's so cool. I love that analogy. The Sun is the Earth's instrument, I suppose you could say.
LM: That's right. Where the Sun is, you know, like the solar wind is kind of like the hands and it's moving the strings on Earth’s magnetic field. Which it is interesting is that when you have the standing waves, you can accelerate these particles to much higher energies.
So this is where I was going before when I was saying about how to harvest that energy. If you can predict this field line resonances, then you have an energy production that can be harvested.
CC: That's really interesting how we might be able to use that possibly to store energy in batteries or something like that, hopefully, and then be able to use that in the future in the same way that we use solar panels.
LM: Another thing that I focus on my research would be how these plasma waves in Earth's magnetic field accelerate particles that precipitate into Earth's magnetic field. So I spent a year and a half in Belgium after my master’s doing research at the Center for Space Radiations where I was looking at the particle precipitation, more specifically, high energy electrons being excited by these plasma waves and how they precipitate into Earth's magnetic field.
CC: So it sounds like you've actually lived all over. How did you come to be at the University of Calgary as a professor?
LM: At my third year of my bachelor’s in physics, I attended a conference where I met a group of scientists from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, and one of them worked at NASA. My long dream was to work at NASA. So I decided to do my master’s at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette with this professor that he participated in a project called HASP, High Altitude Space Payload, creating detectors that can be placed in high altitude balloons launched by NASA.
So that was really appealing for me, and I was sent to Marshall Space Center to study with NASA scientists. So it was really exciting to go to Marshall Space Flight Center, as you can imagine. A little girl from Argentina, that was a great dream.
So when I finished my master’s, I got a job at the Center for Space Radiation under a contract with the European Space Agency doing research. It was at the Center for Space Radiation that I was actually hired to help on the development of the detector, but I got more attracted to do analysis on particle precipitation. So I started digging into the space physics field, and that's where I was hooked.
So in a conference in Italy, while I was presenting my research, a professor from the University of Alberta thought that it was really cool. And he said, why don't you come and do your PhD at the University of Alberta? And that was my trip from Europe back to North America. And arriving here to call Canada.
When I was doing my PhD at the University of Alberta, I got to interact with an amateur balloon team. It's called BEAR. And these are radio aficionados that they like to launch weather balloons just for the fun of it. I got hooked with that idea and I thought, this will be amazing for us to launch low cost balloons to test detectors and do science. The NASA balloons are very costly. They can carry about two metric tons of payload. Well, the weather balloon is limited to one kilogram. So the cost of these balloons are under a thousand dollars per launch.
So I founded the University of Alberta High Altitude Balloon Program, where we will go to schools and do outreach, but also we will put parts of detectors or mini detectors that we can collect data for these particles and waves that you can detect with high altitude balloons. And one professor from the University of Calgary, Dr. Cully, he was developing a project with high altitude balloons. These balloons carry payloads of 70 kilograms. They are taller than the Calgary Tower. They are very long, and they require high infrastructure to be launched.
And he was hiring a postdoc. So I got to interview, and I was super lucky that Dr. Cully decided to hire me to work as his postdoc. And that's how I arrived at the University of Calgary.
CC: That's so cool. You had talked about high altitude balloons previously. Could you just tell me what exactly those are? Are they like really intense hot air balloons?
LM: Hot air balloons go about 500 meters or so from the ground. These high altitude balloons, they go all the way to 30 kilometers above the ground. Even sometimes higher than that, to 35, 37 kilometers high.
So just to give you an idea, an airplane goes at an altitude of 10 kilometers above the ground. They are all different sizes of balloons. You have the little balloons, I call them the baby balloons. These are the weather balloons. Atmospheric scientists, they launch these balloons twice a day, pretty much on any weather station. They are about one meter diameter in size. And like I said, they carry very small payloads, one kilogram.
Then you have bigger balloons. They reach the same altitude, but they can stay up for longer periods of times. When the balloons come, they have a parachute that will help them to safely come to Earth, which is interesting is that before you launch the balloon, you have to run a lot of simulations to see what is going to be the trajectory of these balloons and how to bring them safely to Earth. You don't want a two ton balloon to fall on top of your house, on your roof, right? So we look for very deserted areas.
NASA launches them in New Mexico, in a town called Fort Sumner, which is 50 kilometers from Roswell. So a lot of people confuse the balloons with UFOs, right? And interestingly enough, NASA started launching these balloons in the 1950s, when people started reporting the UFOs massively.
So these balloons, like I said, they come to Earth with a parachute, and once that they have landed, you can go and collect your experiment and your detector, and you can reuse them. They are very environmentally friendly. If you can retrieve the balloon, these balloons are made of latex, and it's very important that you make an effort to try to recover them, so they don't contaminate our planet.
CC: Okay, one more question. You mentioned something called the payload. Could you elaborate a little bit on what a payload is?
LM: In space physics, a payload is what you want to carry. It's your carry on. So for a scientist studying space physics, usually your payload is going to be some type of detector, for example.
If you are in the satellite industry, your payload will be your satellite because you want to deploy this. Your balloon system consists on the actual balloon that is going to be filled with gas, and then you're going to have below the line. Then you have the parachute, and below the parachute, you will have a box.
Usually it's a styrofoam box that will guarantee that your instruments are not going to freeze in the upper atmosphere because, as you can imagine, at 30 or 35 kilometers high, it gets a little bit chilly. So we use a styrofoam box that is light, and inside we put GoPro cameras, of course, because it's always very fun to take a picture of the curvature of the earth, which you can. At that altitude, sometimes I put tetanodes, which are teddy bears that go into upper atmosphere.
Sometimes I put student notes. I do this outreach with schools where the children, they make little astronauts in paper and they put their pictures, and then I take the pictures of them with the curvature of the Earth. And inside of the styrofoam, more importantly, we put either a small detector or sometimes we put even parts of a detector that we want to test for thermal testing or vibration.
Something very important before launching a balloon, high schoolers, amateur people, they like to launch this low-cost weather balloons because they are affordable, because you can put a GoPro camera and take pictures. Lego men comes to mind. I will encourage everybody listening to the podcast to look at the Lego men to high school students from the East Coast of Canada launching Lego men with a Canadian flag.
I would like to encourage everybody to read on the safety concerns that this raises. These balloons are going to cross the path of these airplanes that go to 10 kilometers. So before you launch any balloon, you have to contact your local airport to issue something called a note time. A note time is a note to all airmen, which means that you are letting them know that you are going to launch a balloon that might cross their path.
So we live here in Calgary, right? And we like to go to Banff, which is a city that is close by with mountains, great ski, lakes and so on. So let's say that you decide that you want to go to Banff in the road. It's about 45 minutes, one hour. And you are going to go at night, okay?
If I tell you that at 2:30 a.m. there's going to be a large moose that is going to cross the road and is going to be red, you are going to be at the lookout of this moose. Moose, for anybody listening around the world, is a large animal that if you crash, it will produce damage.
So if you are in the lookout, you will be diligent and try to avoid the crash. In the same token, when we launch a balloon of any size, we said at no time to all Earth men to let them know that we are launching a balloon that is this dimension, that the parachute is of this color. We usually put the parachutes in bright colors so any pilot can see it.
So now the pilot that is going to have a flight that goes through that path is going to be at the lookout. A strike of a balloon to an airplane, it will be catastrophic. So it's very important that anybody that would like to do this activity that makes sure that understands the risk associated with it and to be diligent to do this in a safety manner.
CC: Yeah, for sure. There's definitely a lot of things you got to think about before you just launch a massive balloon into the sky and hope nothing bad happens. Well, thank you so much for introducing us to the topic of space physics and telling us what you do and your journey from your humble beginnings all the way to your now teaching professorship at the University of Calgary.
LM: Absolutely. Thank you very much for having me, Ciara, on the podcast. I wish you good luck and thank you so much for inspiring everybody to go into the field of physics.
CC: Well, that's it for this episode of the PAM Talks. A huge thank you to Dr. Mazzino for sharing her inspiring story on how she became the space physicist she is today. Join us in two weeks for the next episode of the PAM Talks where we will be interviewing Abby Swadling who is going to talk about her work and her time at CERN.
The PAM Talks gratefully acknowledges the support of the University of Calgary Graduate Student Association Quality Money Program.
Transcript copied and edited from Apple Podcasts