Irena David (Kupo)

Liliana Kupo

Planetary Magnetospheres

I have been involved in magnetosphere physics throughout my career. Since the Pioneer flybys and the discovery by Yuri Mekler, Irena Kupo and myself of the Io plasma torus from the ground in 1975 I have focused my attention on the magnetospheres of the outer planets. In fact, I also did a bit of Jupiter radiophysics in the 1970's with Mel Goldstein and with a graduate student, Margalit Ben-Ari. In 1977, I was invited to join the Voyager Plasma Science (PLS) team and since then have enjoyed a great ride on a spacecraft. I had the privilege of participating in the Voyager 2 encounter with Jupiter, both Voyager encounters with Saturn and the Voyager 2 encounters with Uranus and Neptune. During this time, I also had the fun of collaborating with George Siscoe, Charlie Kennel, Marcia Neugebauer, John Richardson and the MIT PLS team led during the early years by the late and sorely missed Herb Bridge and more recently by John Belcher. I had a BSF grant for PLS studies with John from 1989 to 1992 and and GIF grants with Vytenis Vasyliunas from 1993 through 1995 and from 1998 through 2001.. The collaborations are still going on. The students who have worked on planetary magnetospheres with me in one aspect of the other include Margalit Ben Ari, Ron Schreier, Zameret Gan Baruch and Irena Ruvinsky

. In 1996, I was invited to join Don Williams' team that had the Energetic Particle Detector (EPD) on board the Galileo Jupiter Orbiter. I spent a year, 1996-97 at the Applied Physics Laboratory of Johns Hopkins University in Laurel MD working with the EPD data. The collaboration has continued with various lab members to the present day.

After Galileo went to its demise in the atmosphere of Jupiter, my spacecraft hitchhiking took a new turn and after the Cassini Orbiter arrived at Saturn in the summer of 2004, I was asked to join the Plasma Spectrometer (CAPS) team. Saturn is an old love from Voyager days and it is a pleasure to be working again with fresh data from there. In 1999-2001, I did some Saturn studies with Melissa McGrath,John Richardson, Vytenis Vasyliunas and others by means of Hubble Space Telescope data that had come into the public domain.