email 3 – space weather
same notes as always. *** is me, ### is her. take care. mjl
grrr. i tried uploading the video, and the file exceeds the limit. will post it once i get the limit changed.
From: laine
Subject: Re: Misc items – wrapup from CWA
Date: April 21, 2007 3:14:41 PM PDT
To:
On Apr 19, 2007, at 4:33 PM, Barbara
### Hi Michael!
### It was great meeting you last week.
*** it was good to meet you, too.
*** you missed some of the drama of the last day, so here is a recap:
*** http://almostgirl.coffeespoons.org/?p=1109
*** and since then, this:
*** http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2007/04/18/157110.aspx
*** so, yup, its been a pretty eventful week!
*** i am not hurt as bad as most people think i am, but ya, it stings!
### I had a good time, though I always going away thinking of all the things I *should* have said, instead of getting mired in one tangent or another. You handle crowds & questions well, I think they got a lot out of you!
*** i had the same feeling. too much to say, to too many people. and more often the case; not enough time to just sit and listen to all the brilliant people around there…
### I’m following up on a couple of items:
< *** snip – a big section of this message, as it relates to that big project I am working on. I am leaving the rest, as its interesting to see some of the research-in-progress.>
### … a project we’re developing in my research branch, a Earth imager that can sense the outer reaches of the Earth’s magnetosphere. Movie attached – it’s a model, we don’t have images at all. You can see how dynamic it is! Knowing what’s happening in the Earth’s magnetosphere is essential to space weather & space travel.
*** wow, i am stunned by this model. i have to admit i dont really know what i am looking at, but i liken it to a stormy sea – and i would not want to take a boat trip in that weather!
< *** big snip of my comments>
### 2) Space elevator and the earth’s magnetosphere:
### The attached movie shows what you’ll be dragging through once every day. there are huge voltages across those part of the magnetosphere. It’s not as nasty as lightning, but it’s still rough. Still, I think you might be able to use some of it to your advantage, by timing your transits properly or something like that.
### There is a highly respected magnetospheric modeler visiting my branch this month, so I took advantage of his presence and had a meeting of several people to discuss what they think would be important issues for the space elevator. Phew! It was a crazy meeting. They were very interested. I’ll try to sum it up, but I hate typing so I’ll just give you the elements:
*** i hate typing too.. 
i am going to snip the above section, because its not public knowledge, but i will blog the stuff below, because i think people will be very interested.
*** thanks for researching this. its important to us.
### i) space tether folks: they gave me a great contact for tethering issues, they had one tether burn up because it couldn’t handle the current along it. They’ve looked into the issues of interactions from the local current environment, and they’ve even approached ways they can try to gain power from the voltage differences. They gave me the name of a couple of great people who we can follow up with if you’d like.
*** perfect. would like to follow up with that. thanks. i knew about that tether that burned. there were several that were more successful than that, but still we need to understand the environment better.
### ii) here are the elements of what happens as you go higher: earth’s atmosphere (mostly neutral), cloud/lightning zone, ionosphere (high currents & conductivity), inner magnetosphere (high plasma density), outer magnetosphere (less density), magnetopause (higher density again, more current systems), solar wind (different potential than the magnetospheric regions, but the potential in the solar wind should be about the same throughout an orbit, give or take). The inner magnetosphere /plasmasphere is partial corotating with the Earth, while the outer stuff is mostly oriented the same throughout the day. This matters because some of the interactions with the local plasma medium may be current-limited, meaning that although you may have a potential difference between the cable and the local medium, there is only so much current you can draw because there is only so much current there. This produces some interesting effects in the magnetosphere, and is responsible for some voltage drops in weird places!
### either way, we should be able to produce a profile for you, an estimate of what current/voltage/magnetic field/density environment that the elevator will be rotating through.
### 3) Once there is a good profile of what current will be flowing through the space elevator, we should be able to compute the magnetic drag on the elevator. This could be a real problem, if you haven’t already looked at it – the magnetic drag vastly outpowers the density drag once you get beyond the upper atmosphere.
*** sorry, my finance background is showing again… i understood all but the last part. can you go into a little more detail about magnetic drag, and why that matters. i understood the rest.
### Anyhow, that’s a quick summary – I hope some of it was helpful.
*** very very useful. thanks.
### Two of the magnetospheric scientists (
*** i am so happy to see BU getting more involved with space research. that is my school! go BU! i have some other contacts at
### The space tether guy is at the Air Force Research Lab in Hanscom, MA. However, every December we gather in San Francisco for our annual meeting.
*** sure, give me the dates, and i will plan for it. thanks.
### I will be glad to follow up on whatever may interest you. Again, it was great meeting you!
*** i would love to chat with you again. maybe we can grab dinner next time i am out that direction. and if you want a good show, you should come up to NJ when we attempt (and fail) with our 30k ft tether test. details on that later if you want. in any case, it was great to meet you at CWA, and look forward to working with you on these other project.
*** take care. mjl
p.s. i will blog a lot more about CWA in the coming days and weeks. it was a profound experience, and i will be reflecting on it for a while. in a couple days i will get the MP3s of my talks, and will post them. i met people, there, that i think will be personal and professional relationships for years to come. frankly, if i had to get bad news, that was the best possible environment to get it in. its an environment dedicated to changing, and being changed by, the world. and i met some people that ‘rocked’ my world.
Michael J. Laine
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