SW New Mexico News

New Mexico State University (NMSU) astronomy assistant professor Juie Shetye has secured nearly $800,000 in grants from NASA and the National Science Foundation (NSF) to engage students in research on solar phenomena and climate change. The funding will enable both undergraduate and graduate students to participate in two projects: one focusing on the sun's corona holes and another investigating weather changes in Las Cruces, potentially extending to other cities in southern New Mexico.

Shetye received a $230,000 grant over two years through NASA’s SMD BRIDGE initiative, now known as MOSSAIC. This program aims to enhance diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility within NASA's workforce and the broader U.S. science and engineering communities. The second grant is from NSF’s Solar, Heliospheric and Interplanetary Environment (SHINE) program, providing $570,000 over three years for studying corona holes on the sun. It marks the first time NMSU has been awarded either of these grants.

“The undergrads in the MOSAIC program will interact with scientists at Goddard Space Flight Center. Some of their scientists will come here and some students will go there,” Shetye said.

“NASA Goddard Space flight center is sending something called Pandora spectrographs. These massive spectrographs measure the ozone layer and composition of different elements in the area above us in general,” Shetye explained. “The students will be studying atmospheric gravity waves, how they are generated and whether they’re related to any weather phenomena in Las Cruces.”

The NASA MOSAIC project supports five NMSU undergraduate students who will work up to 20 hours per week during the academic year while taking a three-credit summer course with tuition covered. The project can be renewed for up to five years.

The NSF SHINE Program grant allows Shetye to hire two Ph.D. students or up to four undergraduate students over three years.

“The SHINE award is to study some features on the sun; we call them corona holes. We want to study basically the overall magnetic configuration of these corona holes,” Shetye said. “The reason why we are looking at corona holes is because we believe that what happens along the edges of corona holes could accelerate the solar wind. This goes to understanding the origins of space weather.”

Space weather results mainly from solar activity such as flares and coronal mass ejections, which can disrupt communication systems, power grids, satellite operations, and navigation systems due to induced electrical currents during geomagnetic storms.

“We want to make sure that our society is good at handling a geomagnetic storm,” Shetye stated. “We take the sun for granted. Predicting how the sun affects Earth is a big challenge.”

Graduate student researchers under Shetye will use data exclusively from Dunn Solar Telescope at Sunspot Solar Observatory located near Cloudcroft in Sacramento Mountains. They aim to map spectra from this telescope for community access via a website while also working towards understanding birthing regions for corona hole jets affecting space weather.

For Shetye, these grants provide opportunities beyond research outcomes by encouraging diverse student participation including those without STEM backgrounds but interested in analyzing data relevant across disciplines like arts or social sciences.

“I want them [students]to have a little bit of STEM background," she noted."What I found is that undergraduates if given an opportunity will do miraculous work."