Join us on Wednesday, April 8 at 2:30 PM in White Hall, Room G09. Fran Bagenal will present a talk titled "Magnetospheres of the Outer Planets."

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Abstract

 As the name suggests, a planet’s magnetosphere is the region of space influenced by the planet’s magnetic field. The magnetospheres of the giant planets have some similar basic structures as the Earth’s magnetosphere – a bow shock upstream in the solar wind, a magnetosheath of deflected flow around the planet, and a magnetotail downstream – but there are major differences. At Jupiter and Saturn moons are major sources of plasma – Io at Jupiter, Enceladus at Saturn. Uranus and Neptune have highly irregular magnetic fields that are highly tilted from the spin axis which produce irregular magnetospheres that change dramatically over the planet’s spin period. This presentation will review the four giant planet magnetospheres and discuss recent data from Juno at Jupiter as well as remote images of dramatic auroral emissions from HST and JWST. NASA’s Europa Clipper and ESA’s JUICE missions are on their way to Jupiter and, with luck, we’ll get missions back to Uranus and Neptune.

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Biography

Dr. Fran Bagenal is a research scientist and professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder and is co-investigator and team leader of the plasma investigations on NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Juno mission to Jupiter. Her main area of expertise is the study of charged particles trapped in planetary magnetic fields and the interaction of plasmas with the atmospheres of planetary objects, particularly in the outer solar system. She edited the monograph Jupiter: Planet, Satellites and Magnetosphere (Cambridge University Press, 2004).

Born and raised in the UK, Dr. Bagenal received her bachelor degree in Physics and Geophysics from the University of Lancaster, England, and her doctorate degree in Earth and Planetary Sciences from MIT (Cambridge, Mass) in 1981. She spent five years as a postdoctoral researcher at Imperial College, London, before returning to the United States for research and faculty positions in Boulder, Colorado. She has participated in several of NASA's planetary exploration missions, including Voyager 1 and 2, Galileo, Deep Space 1, New Horizons and Juno. In 2015 she stopped teaching to focus on the New Horizons arrival at Pluto and Juno at Jupiter.