D. Gore's Previous Research

The research described below occurred while I was a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Dr. David L. Shealy was my advisor.

If you can't find your way, here's an interactive map of the area.

Most of this occurred at NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center in the Space Sciences Laboratory in Huntsville, Alabama, 100mi north of Birmingham. (here)

Multilayer Band-Pass Soft X-Ray Filters

or My Ph.D. Dissertation in 200 Words or Less

What you see to the left is a Transmission Electron Micrograph (TEM) of a cross section of several thin layers put down via RF triode sputtering. The bottom dark area is the silicon wafer substrate. The alternating white and grey areas are silver and silicon, respecitively. A standard silver-silicon pair is approximately 15nm thick.

Above that is the epoxy used to create the TEM sample.

The structure is comprised of two multilayer mirrors, each consisting of seven pairs of silver-silicon layers. They are face to face across a thicker silicon ``spacer'' and the system can be described as a Fabry-Perot Etalon.

Dr. Palmer N. Peters worked with me to create these narrow band-pass filters for use in the soft xray. These filters could, in theory, be used for visible light rejection and spectral line selection for the MSSTA telescopes (described below).

Multi-Spectral Solar Telescope Array

Prof. Arthur B.C. Walker from CSSA/Stanford University and Richard Hoover at MSFC/ Space Science Laboratory have been working on obtaining images of the sun in soft X-rays. Together with a number of irreplaceble graduate students (of which I was one) they have launched an array of telescopes dubbed the Multi-Spectral Telescope Array (MSSTA) from White Sands Missile Range on a surplus Navy rocket. The mission has been accomplished twice. Once on May 13, 1991 and again on November 3rd, 1994.

This telescope array consits of at least fourteen different telescopes each coated with various multi-layer coatings optimized for imaging various extreme ultraviolet (EUV) wavelengths.

The 1994 flight, on November 3rd, 1994 19:15 UT, carried a total of nineteen telescopes (which I got the dubious honor of focussing and aligning!). Six were Ritchey-Chrétien telescopes, and two were of Cassegrain design. The remaining eleven telescopes were Herschellians. (Beware: a 91436 byte in-line image of the crew lurks on this page)

The first flight, on May 13, 1991 19:03 UT, carried seven Ritchey-Chrétien, two Cassegrain, and five Herschellian telescopes. I was present for most of the photographic work which followed this flight. (Beware: a 102097 byte in-line image lives on this page)

Solar Magnetic Fields

In conjunction with observing and recording EUV emissions from the sun, I worked with Allen Gary on theoretically calculating and modeling expected EUV radiation by:

retrieving magnetograms from the Kitt Peak Solar Vacuum Telescope,

calculating B field lines and flux tubes in the active regions, and guessing at plasma densities and energies.

The goal of this work is to compare the theoretical EUV emissions from within these flux tubes with the data gathered from the MSSTA flights (described above) and images like this from YOHKOH.

Much of this work was done on a 4D/480 Image Processing System.

Back to my front page.

	retrieving magnetograms from the Kitt Peak Solar Vacuum Telescope,
	calculating B field lines and flux tubes in the active regions, and guessing at plasma densities and energies.
	The goal of this work is to compare the theoretical EUV emissions from within these flux tubes with the data gathered from the MSSTA flights (described above) and images like this from YOHKOH.