Chance encounter with Scottish space researcher sparks conversation about Iowa
The connection is not tight, but similarities exist.
Helen Kennedy, a volunteer and librarian for the Tay Valley Family History Society, was helping me in Dundee, Scotland, last Friday, July 3, with family research when I noticed an emblem on the jacket of the man sitting next to her in front of a computer screen.
It was the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) emblem.
“NASA,” I said to the Scotsman in this Firth of Tay costal city. “Have you been there?”’
“No,” said the man — Ken Kennedy, who, it turns out, is the assistant director of the British Astronomical Association’s Aurora and NLC Section. He is a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society (FRAS) who has done some work with NASA.
NLC stands for noctilucent clouds — rare, thin layers in Earth’s upper atmosphere that glow when sunlight hits them at sundown or sunrise. They are about 50 miles above the planet, and Kennedy is studying how ice crystals there behave.
He caught my attention. I covered the University of Iowa’s space physics research program when I was a reporter back in the day.
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“This is a busy time of the year for me because it’s going very strongly right now,” Kennedy said. Noctilucent clouds in the Northern Hemisphere are most visible in the summer months, and Kennedy had just received a new data dump at the beginning of July.
Helen Kennedy is Ken’s wife, which explains why they were in the same office. The Tay Valley Family History Center is a local group that researches and preserves family histories. I was in Scotland last week on a joy trip that included seeking information about ancestors on my mother’s side of the family. I wrote about this quest earlier this year.
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When Ken Kennedy told me his work also includes studying the aurora borealis, my thoughts immediately went to the University of Iowa’s space physics research.
The late James Van Allen was a godfather in the astrophysics community, having discovered the Van Allen Belts, among other findings about space particles by him and others at the university’s famous space physics program.
I still remember Van Allen introducing me to other countries’ space program leaders in 1989 when I covered in Pasadena, California, Voyager 2’s fly past Neptune, its moon, Triton, and new moons the satellite helped researchers discover. He was happy someone from the local newspaper, The Gazette out of Cedar Rapids and Iowa City, cared enough to cover Iowa experiments on Voyager 2. Some of those leaders had been Van Allen’s students.
Kennedy did not know Van Allen but has been studying the aurora borealis along with noctilucent clouds in Dundee since 1958 — the year Van Allen made his famous radiation belts discovery — and, of course, was aware of Van Allen. Plus, Iowa researchers have included the Northern Lights in their massive body of work. They recently reported that a magnetic field created by a solar explosion had expanded as it raced toward Earth.
The British Astronomical Association has existed a long time, forming in 1890 to support amateur astronomers. It created its Aurora and NLC Section in 1899 to observe and report on the aurora in the British Isles, Europe and parts of the northern United States and Canada. Researchers with the group write newsletters and technical papers.
Kennedy said he works with a research team at the University of Colorado, which sends him data for the research he is doing on ice crystals.
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He sees some good Northern Lights shows, being far north on this globe. “We saw a solar maximum one or two years ago,” Kennedy said. “It’s fairly frequent, although the streetlights tend to ruin it.”
Kennedy agreed that it would be fair to say he is relying on some University of Iowa research in some manner because of the way scientific knowledge accumulates and spreads.
Outer space stuff has interested me ever since my parents woke my brother and I up early to watch the United States’ first space flights with humans in the early 1960s. But, I also enjoyed meeting Kennedy because I like exploring whether or not potential Iowa connections exist elsewhere in the world. The connection was thin in this instance but the conversation was fun.
It does not matter how tenuous the connection, obviously.
Lyle Muller is a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative. Check out some of the collaborative’s most recent reporting in this week’s summary.
He also wrote a book.
Connecting conversations make our world smaller and better.