How Our Sun Interacts with the Interstellar Medium - presentation by Jamie Rankin, Ph.D.

Join the Amateur Astronomers Association of Princeton on Tuesday, January 13 for our monthly meeting featuring a fascinating presentation by Jamie Rankin, Ph.D. of Princeton University, entitled "How Our Sun Interacts with the Interstellar Medium."

This past September 24th , a Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida carrying, in carpool-like fashion with two other “ride along” missions, NASA’s IMAP spacecraft. The Princeton-led mission, involving an international team of suppliers and institutions, will examine how solar dynamics interact with the interstellar medium. Dr. Rankin is the instrument lead for SWAPI (Solar Wind and Pickup Ion), one of ten instruments carried by IMAP. In the coming months, IMAP and its accompanying spacecraft will take up residence at L1, a stable location about a million miles sunward of the Earth. From there, IMAP will investigate how the solar wind, a continuous stream of particles emitted by the Sun, interacts with the interstellar medium; how these particles mysteriously get accelerated from their origins to the farthest reaches of the solar system, and the outermost boundary of the heliosphere. Dr. Rankin will discuss the objectives and observations of IMAP, and her role as Project Manager for Voyager data as it passes the outer boundaries of our Sun’s influence. For information regarding attending, visit the AAAP website. https://princetonastronomy.org/speaker.html

About Dr. Jamie Rankin

Still in her mid-30s, Dr. Rankin is young to be an instrument lead on such a major NASA mission as IMAP. She supervises the instrument from a technical perspective, and leads the team interpreting and analyzing the data it collects.

Dr. Rankin earned bachelors’ degrees in music composition and physics from the University of Utah. She’s a talented musician. Conversations with other musicians and also with academics convinced her that a “day job” as a scientist would give her “the freedom to explore and pursue musical endeavors as I wish, without the concerns for trying to make ends meet.” She went to graduate school at Caltech, where she helped build EPI-Hi, (a charged particle detector quantifying high energy particles) now flying through the Sun’s corona on the Parker Solar Probe. Her work on this instrument introduced her to Princeton astrophysicist David McComas, original instrument lead on SWAPI, who promoted her into his original role and invited her to join his research team at Princeton. Dr. Rankin sees it as part of her role to play that mentorship forward.