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“To boldly go where no man has gone before.”

It’s a lofty goal, and a logistical nightmare. As scientists prepare spacecraft to explore the universe, they are challenged with designing for environments where there are often more questions than answers. In one of his projects, Professor Richard Lueptow strives to provide tools to help NASA and the European Space Agency clear key hurdles in their quest to explore our universe through unmanned space missions.

Lueptow’s research has found application in unmanned probes exploring the moons of Saturn. After publishing several papers with post-docs Yefim Dain and Andi Petculescu about their work with NASA on the development of acoustic sensors for detecting gases in spacecraft cabin atmospheres, Lueptow was contacted by a team working on the Cassini-Huygens space probe to see if the same analytical techniques could be used to predict acoustical properties in the atmosphere of Titan, one of Saturn’s moons. The Cassini-Huygens mission is a collaboration of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the European Space Agency and consists of the Cassini orbiter and the smaller Huygens landing probe.

“We considered the gases that are present on Titan and thought we could absolutely predict the acoustics there,” Lueptow says. “The reason that this is important is that often there are acoustic sensors on these probes. For instance, on the Huygens probe, there’s a sensor that tracks changes as the probe moves through the atmosphere and lands on the surface.”

While some past probes have used acoustic sensors, they haven’t been standard on spacecraft, and there hasn’t been a clear understanding of how sound propagates in different atmospheres. Lueptow’s modeling techniques, which are based on quantum mechanics and the kinetic theory of gases, gave scientists the tools they needed to relate the acoustical properties of an atmosphere to its gas composition in order to better use the data captured by the sensors. With this ability, measurements of the acoustic properties obtained during descent can provide information on atmospheric composition and temperature. In addition, the sensors provide the ability to acoustically monitor thunder related to electrical storms, which can provide important data about the nature of the weather on a planet.

Lueptow describes this project as an unintended yet exciting result of his collaborations with NASA. And his work is providing solutions that may bring us one step closer to a deeper understanding of our universe.

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