Third in a series
Re “Spatially Speaking, Levin Is the Man in the Middle”
[Editor’s Note: Steve Levin, rocket scientist, officially will launch his School Board campaign on Saturday afternoon, 10733 Ranch Rd., Culver Crest. See http://levinforschoolboard.com]
[img]1993|right|Steve Levin||no_popup[/img]When we left Dr. Steve Levin yesterday, he was describing his dually delicate and dense role as project scientist for Juno’s outer space trip to Jupiter.
In passing, the most fascinating candidate for the School Board in November mentioned he had been working with the immensely trained scientists, engineers and managers from the outside.
When did this project begin? Turned out to be more complicated than suspected.
“The question is a little hard to measure,” Dr. Levin said. “Roughly 2000.
“Here is what happened. The principal investigator – the scientist responsible for the whole mission – and I were working on modeling of synchrotron things we were trying to use from Jupiter a long time ago.”
(After spelling s-y-n-c-h-r-o-t-r-o-n for his undereducated visitor, Dr. Levin ventured the opinion that “your readers are going to be bored by this.”)
“You take a high-energy electron and you put it in a magnetic field, and it goes around in a circle, moving up and down the field like a spiral. When an electron does that at a very high speed, it gives off radio waves.
“Those radio waves are called synchrotrons,” Dr. Levin.
“We had a project to model the synchrotron emission coming from Jupiter. I was working with Scott Bolton, our principal investigator, and we were talking one day how it would be really useful to have radio measurements, not just from the earth but from near Jupiter to understand the radiation to Jupiter better.
Birth of a Big Burly Baby
“I went back to what I was doing. Scott took the idea, talked to some other people about it, and realized there was a whole lot more that you could do with that instrument on Jupiter than measure the radiation belt.
“That has formed the germ of an idea that eventually became the Juno mission to Jupiter. We have other instruments on board. We are measuring other things on Jupiter when it gets there. We have large scientific goals.”
And that is how Dr. Levin arrived at his answer.
“I date the start of the project from the conversation I just mentioned because that was the idea that led to the project, 13 o4 14 years ago,” he said.
Dear reader, you may not know about Dr. Levin’s stance on pivotal issues, but you now have evidence that if he is elected, the Board, in a juxtaposition manner, will be in cerebral hands.
(To be continued)
