This is a $318,040 grant awarded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to the University of Wisconsin - Madison to conduct research on magnetic pumping as a possible source for the particle power-law distributions observed in the solar wind. The research aims to investigate how time-varying plasma densities and magnetic fields, velocity anisotropy, and pitch angle scattering can heat the solar wind and generate the observed power-law distributions of high-energy...
This federal grant award to the University of Maryland, College Park (UMCP) supports research into the dynamics of the solar wind, specifically investigating how the kinetic coupling of electrons and ions affects the large-scale behavior of the radially expanding solar wind. The research aims to address the "solar wind isotropy problem" - an observed phenomenon where the temperatures of solar wind electrons and protons become nearly isotropic, which has not been fully explained...
This is a $176,548.55 grant award from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to Bitterroot Basic Research Inc., a non-profit organization, to conduct a research study on "Energy Diffusion in the Strahl: A Source of the Solar Wind Halo." The goal is to better understand the relationship between the solar wind strahl and halo populations, including how energy may be transferred between them through short, intense disruptions in the strahl. The study aims to build an...
This is a $901,205 grant awarded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to Predictive Science Incorporated, a for-profit research and analysis firm, for a project focused on understanding the solar wind and its impact on space weather. The grant will fund research into fundamental questions about the origin and acceleration of the solar wind, its connection to smaller-scale solar phenomena, and the partitioning of the wind into fast and slow streams. The work will involve...
The U.S. federal government has awarded a $490,256 grant to the Regents of the University of Michigan, Office of Research and Sponsored Projects to continue developing new data products from the WIND spacecraft's Suprathermal Ion Composition Spectrometer (STICS) instrument. This grant will enable the scientific community to leverage the STICS capabilities to address open questions related to particle acceleration and the fractionation of space plasmas. The WIND spacecraft has been providing...
This is a federal grant award to The Trustees of Princeton University, acting through its Office of Research and Project Administration, for a research project focused on understanding the turbulent nature of the solar wind and its impact on plasma physics. The $427,593.66 grant, awarded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), aims to accomplish several science goals, including determining the mechanisms responsible for perpendicular heating of solar wind ions, examining...
This is a $875,387.00 grant awarded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) for research on the solar wind and its impact on space weather. The grant, which does not have a set-aside designation, is for a period of five years, with a completion date of February 28, 2025. The research aims to improve understanding of the structuring of the solar wind into fast and slow streams, which is a key driver of recurrent geomagnetic...
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) awarded a $523,109.00 grant to the University of Delaware to conduct research on turbulence in the solar wind and its impact on solar energetic particles (SEPs) and galactic cosmic rays (GCRs). The research aims to create a comprehensive knowledge base on the intermittency of turbulence in the heliosphere, which can be used to improve models of SEP and GCR propagation and diffusion. The study will leverage data from NASA's Voyager, ACE,...
This is a $269,682 research grant awarded by NASA's Shared Services Center to the Space Science Institute (SSI), a nonprofit research organization in Boulder, Colorado. The grant is for a project titled "Are Coulomb Collisions Sufficient to Predict Observed Non-Thermal Solar Wind Electrons, Including Their Heat Flow?" The grant does not have a set-aside designation, indicating SSI competed for the award based on scientific and technical merit. As a prime contractor, SSI has extensive...
This is a $607,947 grant awarded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to the University of Arizona for a research project focused on understanding the mechanisms that transfer energy between electromagnetic fields and charged particles in the solar wind. The project aims to identify and characterize the specific plasma and solar wind conditions under which different energy transfer mechanisms dominate, in order to improve global models of the heliosphere. The research will...
This is a $348,562 grant awarded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to the University of Wisconsin-Madison to study the scaling and structure of the solar wind electron distribution. The project aims to analyze solar wind data to uncover the scaling relations of the "strahl", a narrow anisotropic population of suprathermal electrons that plays a significant role in the global energy balance and potential instabilities in the solar wind plasma. The research will leverage data from the WIND, Helios, and Ulysses spacecraft to cover a wide range of heliospheric distances. This grant-funded research project is intended to elucidate the fundamental processes governing the formation and structure of the strahl, which has implications for understanding electron heat conduction in the heliosphere and other astrophysical systems. There was no set-aside designation for this contract award.