Subject of my Studies

Theme of my studies:

PLANET-B is a science mission to Mars and it is scheduled to be launched in July 1998. The main theme of the mission is to make a comprehensive investigations into Martian upper atmosphere, ionosphere and magnetoshere. Mainly, the science division of Japan's Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS) has programmed and promoted this ambitious mission, and for both academic and industrial societies this will be a first satellite rounding planet, of course except for the Earth.

Some scientists say that the Mars has no intrinsic magnetic field, and others say it has but very week one. On the other hand, the Earth has strong intrinsic magnetic field compareing to the Mars. Thus, the interaction between solar wind and Martian ionosphere and/or magnetosphere must be quite different from Earth's case which has deeply surveyed and studied with using enormous data obtained by space probes, such as GEOTAIL.

In reality, previous data obtained from satellites visited the Mars have strongly supported the fact that Mars has no or only faint intrinsic magnetic field. If PLANET-B mission will succeed and each science instrument will run normally, we will get to investigate many of the unkown and uncertain phenomenon comprehensively, and probably we will newly find some interesting and novel phenomenon. I believe that its success should satisfy peoples' curiousness for science. It is a quite important contribution to the world, I think. Secondary, it can appeal Japan's contributions to the space physics. It is also important.

Totaly 15 science instruments will be carried by PLANET-B to the Mars, and each science team has developed its own instrument to be sophisticated one. Because my interests cheifly centre on the Martian plasma environment, I feel great interests to its sensors related plasma measurements, such as magnetometer and plasma wave instruments. Moreover, PLANET-B will carry two plasma particle instruments and we call them Ion Spectrum Analyser (ISA) and Electron Spectrum Analyser (ESA). ISA is developed in order to measure positive ion and ESA is carried just literelly for electron measurements.

The subject of my studies has been development of those two science instruments since I started to study for the degree of master of science about 4 and a half years ago. The D-day of its launch will come next summer. We have already finished assembling the flight-model sensors and also finished some performance tests of them. Now, we are under final stage of development, in other words, we are operating with tuning experiments for flight-model sensors. Because I have dealt with development of those sensors for all over my graduate school days, I can't represent how strongly I hope for their success.

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