Dr. Stephanie Howard

What motivated you to pursue a career in space plasma physics?

For as long as I can remember, I've always had a love for math; there were logical rules it followed, and solving the problems was like solving a puzzle. What made me fall in love with physics was the first time I took a calculus-based physics class in high school. Seeing how those abstract math equations I already liked to solve were now used to describe physical phenomena in the real world just made something click in my head. During my undergrad I bounced around doing small research projects in multiple physics fields but could never really settle on anything. When it came time to apply to grad school, I knew I wanted to keep doing physics and that I was interested in space, so I applied to and was accepted to the University of Iowa. It was there that I was first exposed to the field of space plasma physics, and I enjoyed it so much that I decided it was the field I wanted to pursue a career in.

Tell us about the research projects you are currently working on.

One of the projects I'm currently working on is using data from the MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN) spacecraft to create a disturbance index for the Martian magnetosphere. Similar to how indices like the Kp or Dst index track geomagnetic storm activity on Earth, we wanted a way to quantify how disturbed the Martian magnetosphere becomes from solar events such as ICMEs (interplanetary coronal mass ejections). However, because the Martian magnetosphere is structured in a completely different way from Earth's magnetosphere, we can't just copy and paste the indices used at Earth over to Mars. Instead, we are having to build our own from scratch. Our current approach to this is based on some of the earliest indices used at Earth and is a measure of the normalized magnetic field magnitude and variability for a given orbit of MAVEN.

The other project I'm currently working on is the Lunar Magnetotelluric Sounder (LMS) instrument package that was part of Firefly's Blue Ghost lunar lander. For this project I've mostly been providing support for the magnetometer team and the main science investigation. On the instrument and data processing side of things, I've been helping to remove other spacecraft signals from our data to prepare it for release to the public. For the science side, I've been getting to go back to my PhD research in the lunar plasma environment, and my knowledge of the THEMIS-ARTEMIS spacecraft and dataset, to help the science team sort out what signals are inherent to the lunar surface and what is outside influence from the solar wind.

Photo Credit: NASA/Kim Schiflett.

What do you enjoy the most about your job?

Most of my day-to-day research involves a lot of staring at data on a computer screen, but working here in the Planetary Magnetospheres Lab at Goddard gives me the opportunity to see all the effort that goes into producing that data, and often-times lend a hand to that process. While I’ve been at Goddard, I’ve gotten the chance to help test and calibrate a couple of the magnetometers heading into space on different spacecrafts. I’ve also started doing some work in processing and quality checking the data we get back from space before it’s ready to be released publicly, and I find it’s a sometimes-overlooked part of research that I enjoy doing.

Photo Credit: Dave Sheppard.

What science question intrigues you the most?

One of the outstanding science questions that I’m most interested in is the magnetospheres of the icy giant planets Uranus and Neptune. Both Uranus’ and Neptune’s magnetospheres are structured very differently from any other planet in our solar system. Unlike other planets with an internal dipole magnetic field, Uranus’ and Neptune’s magnetic field axis are significantly offset from their axis of rotation, and the center of the dipole is offset from the center of the planet. To date, the only in situ data we have from these magnetosphere’s is from the flybys done by Voyager 2. I look forward to the day we send another spacecraft to Uranus and/or Neptune so that we can get a more comprehensive idea of what the magnetospheres and plasma environments of these icy giants are like.

If you were to expand your current research focus, what new topic(s) would you explore?

If I had the chance to expand my current research focus, I think I would like to delve deeper into the topics of solar storms and space weather. With my current research project with MAVEN, I’m getting to see some of the effects these storms have on the Martian magnetosphere, but there is also a lot of space plasma physics behind the storms themselves that I don’t know much about yet. It is also a topic that is important to understand because of the impact it can have on modern technology and space exploration; solar storms can pose a safety hazard to human space flight, and they can have detrimental effect on our modern telecommunications.

Photo Credit: Stephanie Howard.

What do you like to do in your free time?

I’ve been into martial arts since my early teens and have been practicing various ones off and on since around the time I was thirteen. Taekwondo is the one I’ve practiced the most, and the only one I’ve done enough to get a blackbelt in, but I’ve also dabbled in other martial arts such as hapkido, judo, and karate. On the more creative side of things, I love to crochet and knit. The basics of crochet I learned from my mom and grandma growing up, and during grad school I picked it back up as a hobby along with teaching myself how to knit. Recently I’ve also started picking up quilting and sewing with an eye towards being able to make and alter my own clothes.

Photo Credit: Stephanie Howard.

What are your future research interests and goals?

With so many proposed missions to land instruments on the moon in the upcoming years, I’d like to revisit some of the research on the lunar plasma environment I did back in grad school. Most research in this area is done using data from lunar orbiters, but with the possibility of getting particle and field measurements from the lunar surface we could get a more complete picture of how the Moon interacts with the surrounding plasma environment. As a longer-term goal, I would also like to be able to have a hand in a spacecraft mission from start to finish.