This is an article I wrote as a science writing assignment for the graduate writing program at Johns Hopkins University, 1997. The emphasis of my graduate writing degree was in science writing.

Heavner's Heavens

Could you believe a bumper sticker that reads: Science Happens? Science discovery often requires years of grueling work, sizable risk, and facing many disappointments before finding a few "gems" - like prospecting for gold. The prospectors, in many cases, are university science professors. We hear when they find gold because significant advances in their work typically get publicized. But how often do we hear stories about the excellent job done by their mules, the dedicated graduate students? This is the story of how one graduate student, on the forefront of new discovery, is earning his right of passage.

Sunset, August 18, 1995:

The twin-engine aircraft screams upward over the dense tropical rainforest, penetrating the thick cloud cover that, for the moment, hangs high above San Jose, Costa Rica. The crew hopes local visibility will remain favorable for a safe return. Because clouds settle at night on the 3,000-foot-high airfield, late night round-trip flights are not typical, but neither are the passengers or their destination a massive thunderstorm over northern Nicaragua.

The passengers, members of a research team from the University of Alaska-Fairbanks (UAF), make final adjustments on data collection equipment, including a unique low-light-level television system. Designed expressly for ground-based study of the Aurora Borealis (the pink, green, and white dancing curtains of light seen in the winter skies over Alaska), the wide angle "All Sky" camera will aim at the cloudless, dark sky between the storm and outer space. These conditions make a perfect natural backdrop for viewing red sprites and blue jets --two newly discovered dazzling light phenomena that occur above thunderstorms. The team expects to collect more data to help scientists explain these phenomena, and determine what impact these huge, colorful bursts of electrical energy may have on the Space Shuttle, future high-altitude aircraft, and on the chemistry of the atmosphere.

An alarm sounds. The pilot's airspeed indicator is out, but the copilot's is still operating normally. Aircraft instrument trouble comes as no surprise to newest team member Matt Heavner. "Must be the moisture, " he thinks. Water droplets from the heavy tropical humidity continue dripping from the inside surfaces of the plane, as the physics graduate student struggles to keep the team's electronic equipment dry and operational.

With only one airspeed indicator, the pilot decides to abort the flight and circle back to San Jose. But, before he completes the turn, his airspeed indicator begins functioning again. When the indicator continues to operate properly for several minutes, the pilot decides to make another attempt to reach the great storm flashing on the horizon.

A second alarm sounds. The copilot's airspeed indicator is out. The pilot informs his passengers that he may have to make an emergency landing in Nicaragua. No one on the team is less pleased with this news than young Heavner. It's his twenty-fourth birthday. He had hoped to be spending the rest of it in an environment friendly toward Americans. As the pilot initiates emergency procedures, the copilot's indicator comes back on, but the pilot decides not to risk the safety of the aircraft and immediately heads back to San Jose, racing the descending clouds over the airfield to the runway.

In 1993, twenty-three-year-old Matt Heavner said goodbye to his friends and family in Texas to pursue a doctoral degree in physics at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. "I've always dreamed of one day going to Alaska," says Heavner, who brought along a deep love for science and an open mind for adventure, but never anticipated such high-flying adventure. Looking back, Heavner admits that a series of lucky events led to his becoming a member of the elite jets and sprites team: choosing atmospheric physics over astronomy, being selected by the University of Alaska, and arriving at about the same time as the school's research grants.

Alaska appeals to Heavner's athletic and adventurous nature. The six-foot tall, sandy-haired grad student bicycles eight miles to the campus every day (six, once the stream near the cabin freezes over) from a wood-heated log cabin insulated with hay. The cabin has electricity, but no indoor plumbing. Twice weekly he hauls water from the stream. The cheerful grad student loves his Alaskan lifestyle but insists it is not totally rustic. "We don't have TV," says Heavner, "but we do have a computer and two phone lines." What about the chilling-to-the-bone winter night treks to the outhouse? "It's no inconvenience," he quickly replies. "I wouldn't trade it for anything." Heavner says that whenever he steps out into the crisp night air, he always takes time to gaze up at the dancing colors of the Aurora, which mark the upper boundary of the heaven full of flashing lights he lives to explore.

Since the early days of flight, many pilots have reported seeing glimpses of light flashing in the sky high above the clouds. Scientists ignored these reports until 1989. Space Shuttle cameras, intended to videotape scattered light from lightning over the horizon, caught a couple of "surprises" on film. The fabled flashes could no longer be ignored. Over the next two years, curious investigators videotaped more of the flashes. With interest in the newly discovered phenomenon beginning to peak, scientific papers of the first recorded observances were presented at the Fall 1991 American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting in San Francisco.

University of Alaska physics professor Davis D. (Dave) Sentman attended the meeting and returned to Fairbanks excited over the possibility that the University could assume a lead role in this new research area. He first shared his plan with faculty and students at their Friday night physics club meeting. Geophysics professor Eugene (Gene) Wescott agreed that their unique All Sky camera equipment could give the school a head start on the competition.

Within the year, the researchers arranged to get their equipment and themselves aboard a NASA funded DC-8 research jet, crowding in along with six independent research teams. The jet conducted flights out of the Caribbean island of Aruba. The other teams preferred day flights so that they would land in time for happy hour. This frustrated the professors from Alaska who counted on night flights to make their observations. However, luck was with the team on the final flight back to the west coast. Flying in darkness, they encountered thunderstorms over the mid-west and recorded a few sprites with their special television system. From the quality of their data, NASA and the National Science Foundation recognized the team's ability to conduct valuable atmospheric research. Both organizations provided the finding necessary for the school to further investigate sprites.

"As a graduate student, " Heavner says, "1 can get away with saying they're 'neat.' I study them because they're cool." But, getting serious, he explains, "the elusive, beautiful flashes [sprites] above the clouds" may be a critical link in the energy chain between outer space and the earth. According to Heavner, the phenomenon occurs in a region of the upper atmosphere that the team calls the “ignorosphere"- the area most ignored by science. The study of space physics stops at the bottom of the Aurora in the ionosphere, and atmospheric science stops at the top of the stratosphere. Between these two regions lies the ionosphere: too high for research aircraft and balloons, and too low for satellites. The team speculates that electrical activity in the ionosphere may be affecting the ozone level. "There may be some ozone chemistry going on there [with the sprites]," Heavner says, "and it's really important to know how much energy is involved.”

With NASA and NSF funding in place, two seasoned professors and an expert television engineer were joined by two enthusiastic graduate students to become the school's sprites research team. They quickly earned acclaim as leading investigators in chasing red sprites and blue jets.

The clean-shaven, forty-year-old Sentman leads the team as principal investigator and is Heavner's faculty advisor and mentor. A favorite among the students, Sentman receives invitations to all their functions. Grad students refer to getting trapped for hours in his office, when they only needed a quick answer to a question, as getting "Sentmaned." Sentman teamed up with physics professor Gene Wescott, who is well versed in jet aircraft, rocket, and satellite measurements. Wescott, in his sixties, sports a white ponytail and projects a voice as deep as that of James Earl Jones. A respected "first ascent" Alaskan mountain climber, the students refer to him as "a real character, one you just have to meet. " Senior grad student Don Hampton, thirty-six, no longer with the team, is now a physicist at Ball Industries.

Sentman hated to see such a "superb, fantastic" student leave, and continues to look for ways to keep Hampton involved in Sprites studies. Matt Heavner, who at twenty-six, is now the youngest and tallest team member, is writing his thesis and hopes to graduate in another year. "Matt has been a central part of our research," Sentman says. "The way it developed has been because of his skill with computers. " And, the team would be nowhere without the behind-the-scenes video recording skills of Dan Osborne, the Institute's television engineer, along with his All Sky television camera and recording system.

The team has logged hundreds of flight hours, covering tens of thousands of miles, collecting, documenting, and analyzing data. Their most successful field trip was in 1994. Provided with two jet aircraft, their Sprites '94 campaign flew over storms around Norman,

Oklahoma, and achieved several scientific "firsts" by determining the height of the energy bursts, photographing them in color, and determining their color origin. Using two aircraft with verifiable altitudes and positions relative to the observed bursts, the team accurately calculated the height of individual bursts and established an average height for both types. Knowing the physical dimensions of the phenomenon was the first critical step in determining the level of energy they contained.

Sentman is proud of the team's special accomplishments and of their extraordinary, persistent effort under the most trying conditions. "We play to each other's strengths," says Sentman, "and cover one another's weaknesses." Sentman emphasizes that there are no titles or pretenses among team members. When they go to the field, everyone pitches in to get the work done. Whether the task involves lifting, carrying, connecting, operating, or cleaning, they all do it together as a team.

Before this campaign, Sentman, joining students in a cabin for coffee one morning, suggested "sprites" (from Shakespeare), as members of the team struggled to produce a suitable name for the phenomenon. The term best described the bursts' elusive and fleeting nature. Everyone liked it, and it stuck.

Sprites are more plentiful than jets. Lasting several thousandths of a second, they can only be seen with the naked eye as split-second flashes, but high-speed cameras reveal minute details. Sprites usually occur during the decaying stage of a powerful storm, and a single storm may produce over a hundred. The upper, main portion of a sprite is blood red and resembles the body of a jellyfish (thus the name red sprite). Like a jellyfish, it has bluish-purple tendrils extending down its length. Where a normal bolt of lightning has an average diameter of four inches, the typical sprite diameter is six miles. Its volume can be hundreds of cubic miles. The bottom of sprites starts at an altitude of twenty-five miles (about twelve miles above storm clouds) and extends upward sixty miles to the lower edge of the earth's ionosphere. "The ionosphere," Heavner explains, " is an electrical blanket. It's where the Aurora occurs. Similar to how the atmosphere protects us from UV rays, it protects us from solar charged particles coming in [from space]."

The more elusive blue jets are believed to occur mostly during the earlier stages of a storm, typically during daylight, making their detection difficult. "They're not as bright as sprites," explains Heavner, "and blue light scatters easily due to the atmosphere, also making them harder to see." Unlike the quick flash of a sprite, a jet lasts longer. "The jets you can actually see propagate from the cloud top up, and so, they last between 200 to 300 milliseconds," says Heavner. "They sort of look like a whale spout going up." Calling them "blue starters" at first, then "blue shooters," the team finally agreed on blue jets because of their jet spray appearance. Blue jets spray toward space at 225,000 miles per hour (three hundred times faster than sound). Like sprites, jets are approximately six miles in diameter but only reach altitudes of twenty-eight miles.

In addition to altitude, the team determined that atoms in nitrogen molecules excited by charged particles (electrons) give sprites their characteristic colors. They used a television slit spectrograph (an instrument that can accurately analyze light sources) aboard one aircraft to measure the length of light waves emitted by the sprites. The results, compared to data obtained in laboratory studies, revealed a fingerprint pointing to nitrogen.

As Heavner explains, the phenomenon is like what occurs in lightning: concentrated electrons in bolts of lightning bombard nitrogen molecules with such force that they rip apart the nitrogen atoms. The electrons in the wider, less dense sprites and jets, however, appear to hit the nitrogen atoms with less energy. They only "bump" the atoms enough to knock electrons slightly out of normal orbits. Following a collision, the nitrogen electrons return to their normal orbit, releasing energy gained from the collision in the form of light. But why do we see red and blue and not some other color?

When white light is bent by a prism, or moisture in the air, a rainbow of color appears. This is because white light is composed of many colors: waves of light with varying lengths, called wavelengths. When light passes from air into a denser medium, like a prism or water, each wavelength bends differently causing the waves to separate and the colors to fan out. When electrons are forced out of their normal orbit for any reason, they release a quantity and wavelength of light that is unique to that element. The blood red top of sprites (the jellyfish body) matches the red emitted by nitrogen excited by a lower energy collision, while the sprites' lower bluish region (the jellyfish's tendrils) matches the blue color emitted by nitrogen excited by a higher-energy collision.

Following the team's first success at color analysis while in flight, Heavner and Hampton persuaded their professors to allow them to conduct a ground-based study. They wanted to obtain steady color data measurements to compare them with those taken aboard the moving and vibrating aircraft. In the summer of 1995, granted both permission and money, the two graduate students set out on their own to conduct sprite wavelength studies atop Mount Evans near Boulder, Colorado. This proved to be their most challenging field work experience.

Thirty large boxes of equipment and supplies arrived from Alaska. Heavner and Hampton loaded their small van with as much gear as they could squeeze in each time and made many trips up the 14,000-foot mountain. Even though it was June, winds kept drifting snow across the road between trips forcing them to stop and shovel to get through. Insurmountable snow drifts forced them to stop at 13,000 feet.

Coming from Fairbanks with an altitude of four hundred feet, Heavner and Hampton struggled to acclimate to the new altitude. The students gasped for breath in the thin Rocky Mountain air as they shoveled through four to six feet of snow to set up their equipment. Since gasping was what they found themselves doing most of the time, they thought it fitting to name the campaign GASP '95. Had they been able to make it the last 1,000 feet to the top, an A-frame building with large electric generator would have welcomed them. They had to settle for a makeshift site along the roadside, drawing power from a tiny generator.

"We were on the mountain for about two months, so luckily we got along really well," says Heavner. "We both enjoy climbing mountains and playing in the snow, so we got a lot of that in during the day." As the young scientists patiently waited in the snowy dark for the development of distant storms, they had fun thinking up words to fit the acronym GASP: Ground-based Alaskan Sprites Campaign '95; Great Alaskan Sprites Pilgrimage; General Acronym Seeking Purpose; and Heavner's favorite -- Geeks Attempting Sprites Physics. They never decided on one.

"These guys did a superb job," Sentman says. In addition to obtaining the best spectral color data available so far, they created an Internet Web page using a laptop computer with built-in modem and a cellular phone. At the time, the Web page gave the world instant access to the Sprites data as the two of them collected it. The sprites page is still active on the Internet today: http://elf.gi.alaska.edu/. "There's no classroom instruction on how to do research," Sentman says. "Going after unknown things, there's no prescribed procedure. You're improvising constantly." Heavner and Hampton learned that they could repair electronic equipment in a crunch to keep the mission going.

"It was incredible field work," Heavner says with a mock sigh of exhaustion. "I mean, trying to use every trick you could come up with." With all equipment ready for operation, their video recorder jammed. The storm they had been waiting for patiently would soon be ripe for data collection. Without the recorder they would miss the long-awaited opportunity. Hampton disassembled the recorder on the mountainside, cleared the jam, and got it working in time. No data was missing.

The following summer the entire team returned to Mount Evans for the Sprites '96 campaign. By this time, many more research groups had organized and crowded the available observation decks. "We were tripping over each other's cameras, getting in each other's way," Heavner says, "but we got some really good observations up there." The Alaskan team felt it necessary to relocate to Wyoming, to a less crowded vantage point, to take their measurements in peace. This trip netted more detailed wavelength measurements into the blue region of the Red Sprites. There was less adventure this time, permitting more focus on collecting quality information for later analysis. The team is optimistic that the data collected by them during their many field trips will soon start to provide answers to exactly what these beautiful, yet bizarre, sprites and jets are.

As the team's specialized equipment is once again positioned to study the Aurora over the long winter, most of Heavner's time gets spent back at the Geophysical Institute. There he will help Sentman and Wescott in the long tedious task of analyzing the volumes of data collected. Though there is plenty of work ahead writing and presenting professional science papers, Heavner allows himself time to play. On Sundays, he can be heard hosting "Dead Sessions", the college radio station program featuring his favorite band The Grateful Dead. Something new for him this winter: he is taking care of a neighbor's seven dog sled team, running them a few times a week. Much of his free time is spent congregating with professors and fellow grad students in their cabin community, playing board games, sharing stories, while cooking up some moose burgers or throwing together some moose tacos.

Somewhere in between all his social activities, global adventures, and tedious hours of data analysis, Matt Heavner manages to devote time to drafting his doctoral thesis on atmospheric electricity so he can eventually graduate. Most grad students look forward with eagerness to the day they graduate, because they get to try their wings and move on to promising careers. But, Heavner has found heaven right where he is. "I love Alaska," he says. "I'll never want to leave this place.”