University of Minnesota EFASC Instrument Suite for the NASA Radiation Belt Storm Probes (RBSP)

The Space Plasma Physics Group at the University of Minnesota is proud to announce NASA's selection of the main portion the EFASC instrument suite, the Electric Field Instrument (EFI), for inclusion on the Radiation Belt Storm Probes (RBSP) Mission. U of MN Physics Professor John Wygant is the Principal Investigator for EFASC/EFI. (A search coil will also be flown on the mission by a collaboration headed by Dr. Craig Kletzing at the University of Iowa.) RBSP is a two spacecraft mission designed to study the Earth's Radiation Belts and associated phenomena and is currently scheduled for launch in 2012. The EFI is to consist of a fully three-dimensional electric field detector with two orthogonal probe pairs extended in the spacecraft spin plane and one pair of probes extended from the spacecraft spin axis. The primary role of the EFI (from the EFASC instrument suite), which involves a collaboration between the University of Minnesota and a number of other institutions, will be to measure the electric fields from various space plasma phenomena. Institutions collaborating with the University of Minnesota on the EFASC/EFI proposal include the University of California, Berkeley, the University of California, Los Angeles, the University of Colorado, Boulder, Dartmouth College, University of Alberta in Canada, the Air Force Research Laboratory in Lexington Massachusetts, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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