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Dr. Eric R. Christian NASA HQ Code DF0001 Earth-Sun System Division 300 E Street SW Washington DC 20546 USA (202) 358-1763 FAX: (202) 358-3987 eric.r.christian@nasa.gov |
My current position is at NASA Headquarters in Washington DC. I am Program Scientist for the Solar Terrestrial Probes in the Earth-Sun System Division (ESS) at NASA Headquarters, and I'm also the Discipline Scientist for Heliospheric Physics.
I am an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Physics Department at Washington University in St. Louis working with the Laboratory for EXperimental Astrophysics (LEXAS)
I am also the editor of CosNews, the Newsletter of the C4 Commission on Cosmic Rays of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP).
I am Program Scientist for the following Missions:
ACE
(Advanced Composition Explorer) is a spacecraft that was launched in August 1997 on a Delta rocket from Kennedy Space Flight Center. It is orbiting the Earth-Sun Libration point (L1) looking at charged particles from solar wind energies (100 eV) up to galactic cosmic rays (500 MeV/nucleon). | |
IBEX Interstellar Boundary Explorer IBEX has just been selected as a SMEX (small explorer) with a launch date in 2008. It will use energetic neutral atoms (ENAs) to map out the structure of the solar wind termination shock. | |
Stereo (Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory)) is a mission that will use two nearly identical spacecraft to give us a stereoscopic (3-D) vision of the Sun. The prime goal is the understanding of the fundamental nature and origin of coronal mass ejections (CMEs), the most energetic eruptions on the Sun and the primary cause of major geomagnetic storms. Stereo is due to launch in February, 2006. | |
Ulysses
is a joint NASA and European Space Agency (ESA) mission to study the Sun at all latitudes. It was launched by the Shuttle Discovery on October 6, 1990 and then used a Jupiter gravity assist to get it into a nearly polar orbit around the Sun. The primary science goal is to characterize the heliosphere as a function of solar latitude. | |
VOYAGER
The Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft are still transmitting data from beyond the orbit of Pluto. I did my thesis with data from the Cosmic Ray Subsytems onboard. There is currently a controversy on whether or not Voyager 1 has crossed the solar wind termination shock. | |
Wind
WIND was launched on November 1, 1994 and is the first of two NASA spacecraft in the Global Geospace Science initiative and part of the ISTP Project. |