NMSU professor receives NASA, NSF grants to inspire student researchers

Minerva Baumann, New Mexico State University

LAS CRUCES - New Mexico State University astronomy assistant professor Juie Shetye is inviting students to study secrets of the sun and causes of climate change through two grants of nearly $800,000 combined.

The awards allow Shetye to hire both undergraduate and graduate students to research two projects: one related to the sun’s corona holes, the other about the causes of weather changes in Las Cruces and may be expanded to other cities in southern New Mexico.

Shetye received a two-year, $230,000 grant from through NASA’s SMD BRIDGE (now called MOSSAIC), an initiative to improve diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility within the NASA workforce and the broader U.S. science and engineering communities. The second grant is from the National Science Foundation’s Solar, Heliospheric and INterplanetary Environment (SHINE) program. The award provides $570,000 over three years to study features on the sun called corona holes. It’s the first time NMSU has received 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 said. “The students will be studying atmospheric gravity waves, how they are generated and whether they’re related to any weather phenomena in Las Cruces.”

NASA MOSAIC will support five NMSU undergraduate students, who will be paid up to 20 hours per week and in the summer take a three-credit course with tuition and fees paid while receiving summer pay. The two-year project is like a stepping-stone for students who may be interested in further research related to astronomy and pursue a Ph.D. The grant is eligible to be renewed for five years.

The NSF SHINE program grant allows Shetye to hire two Ph.D. students or as many as 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 is mainly caused by solar activity like solar flares and coronal mass ejections. These events can significantly impact Earth by disrupting communication systems, power grids, satellite operations and navigation systems, particularly through induced electrical currents in the ground during geomagnetic storms.

“We want to make sure that our society is good at handling a geomagnetic storm,” Shetye said. “We take the sun for granted. Predicting how the sun affects Earth is a big challenge. I feel like we don’t pay enough attention to it.”

Shetye’s graduate student researchers will be using data exclusively from the Dunn Solar Telescope at the Sunspot Solar Observatory. The observatory, managed by the NMSU-led Sunspot Solar Observatory Consortium, is located in the Sacramento Mountains, about 18 miles south of Cloudcroft.

The students will study the spectra of the Sun from the Dunn Solar Telescope and create maps to display via a website available to the community. The next two science goals are related to understanding the birthing regions for these corona-hole jets and to better understand their impact on space weather.

For Shetye, these grants offer more than research results alone, they also can provide a launching pad for many students who may never have considered careers in science or research.

“I want to train students to analyze data and find patterns, especially those coming from a non-STEM background,” Shetye said. “I want them to have a little bit of STEM background, but students from arts, creative media or social sciences, they can join in this research because eventually we are studying something that affects our society. What I found is that the undergraduates, if given an opportunity, will do miraculous work.”

Minerva Baumann writes for New Mexico State University Marketing and Communications and can be reached at 575-646-7566, or by email at mbauma46@nmsu.edu.