SMART Mission
Magnetospheres
Currently, Dr. McLain is working on building and calibrating a suite of Search Coil Magnetometers. The Tri-axial Search Coil (TASC) unit is an orthogonal set of AC magnetic field sensors capable of detecting the B-field vector of an electromagnetic plasma or radio wave. Dr. McLain will support the TASC build in sensor development, calibration, and integration for the upcoming sounding rocket mission called Beam-PIE (PI. Rob Pfaff), and a DARPA funded mission called SMART.
Lunar Environment And Dynamics for Exploration Research (LEADER)
Plasma Processes
Dr. McLain is the NASA GSFC Experimental lead for the LEADER project. Dr. McLain utilizes several surface science techniques to study volatiles on lunar soils retreived during the Apollo missions. Over the last decade the discovery of water ice and possibly CO2 frost at the poles of the Moon has renewed the quest for establishing access to these resources. The discovery of CO2 and water by missions such as LRO, LADEE, and MESSENGER has created numerous questions about how and where these volatile species originated.
The Sodium and Potassium Cycle in the Exosphere and on the Surface of Mercury and the Moon: Synthesis of Experiments, Data and Models
Mercury
Dr. McLain is the Experimental Lead on a Solar Systems Workings project with M. Sarantos (PI) to study UV photon stimulated desorption of Na and K from lunar soils and Mercury analogs as a function of wavelength and soil temperature. We plan use these findings to build new models of how the space environment interacts with the surfaces of the Moon and Mercury, which we can use to better predict the processes and behaviors around similar bodies.
The Effects of Space Weathering: Lab Analysis of Neutral/Ion Sputtering on Lunar Soils
Space Weather
The goals of this research is to determine the relative and absolute solar wind sputtering “heavy” ion yields on a suite of lunar soils. We will characterize the composition and kinetic energy (velocity) distribution of sputtered and low energy reflected neutrals from several different lunar soil types based on maturity and mineralogy. These data are needed to understand the fate of these particles and to compare to remote sensing data (Sarantos, Killen et al. 2012) and references therein.
Visualizing Ion Outflow via Neutral Atom Sensing-2 (VISIONS2) Sounding Rocket Mission Miniaturized Imager for Low Energy Neutral Atoms (MILENA 1, 2 and Tech. Demo)
Earth's Ionosphere
Dr. McLain was a co-I on the recently launched VISIONS 2014 and VISIONS2 2018 sounding rocket missions. For these missions, we built four similar MILENA instruments (Miniaturized Imager for Low Energy Neutral Atoms). The primary science goals of VISIONS was to identify how, when, and where ions are accelerated to velocities sufficient (≥ 5 eV) to reach high altitude acceleration regions in the auroral zone below 1000 km, following substorm onset. We reported in Collier et al. 2015, our initial results from the VISIONS rocket that flew through and near several regions of enhanced auroral activity and sensed regions of ion outflow both remotely and directly. Additional observations were made with VISIONS2, which is part of the Grand Challenge Initiative-Cusp, an international collaboration to explore the polar cusp-where Earth’s magnetic fields bend down to meet the poles and solar wind particles can enter our atmosphere. The Grand Challenge is a collection of 9 missions and 12 rocket launches.
