Seminar: Environmental Challenges and Opportunities for Low Earth Orbit - Oct. 30
Tomoko Matsuo
Associate Professor, Smead Aerospace
Friday, Oct. 30 | 10:40 A.M. | AERO 111
Abstract: LEO is becoming our shared backyard! As society increasingly relies on LEO as a critical infrastructure layer for communications, Earth observation, and other space-based activities, the need to understand and predict its highly dynamic environment and account for environmental variability in spacecraft design and operations is growing.
Yet, the near-Earth space environment remains incompletely observed and difficult to predict, particularly during geomagnetic disturbances. My research group addresses these challenges by integrating diverse observations with physics-based models using advanced statistical and computational methods, while advancing scientific cyberinfrastructure, data science methodologies, and observing-system design.
This seminar will highlight our recent research on characterizing thermospheric mass density and its uncertainty, assessing the impact of density uncertainty on orbit prediction, and estimating magnetospheric energy inputs that drive atmospheric variability during geomagnetic storms. I will also discuss the development of open-source scientific cyberinfrastructure and data-driven methodologies that enable the broader research community to investigate geospace dynamics.
Looking forward, the seminar will explore emerging scientific and technological opportunities in very low Earth orbit (VLEO), where the transition between continuum and rarefied-gas regimes presents new challenges for environmental modeling and spacecraft operations.
Together, these efforts illustrate how fundamental geospace science and aerospace engineering can reinforce one another, advancing scientific discovery while enabling the next generation of space systems.
Bio: Tomoko Matsuo is in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences. Her research interests span atmospheric and space sciences, geophysical fluid and gas dynamics, and applied statistics. She is a member of the Department’s Remote Sensing, Earth and Space Sciences Focus Area and the Colorado Center for Astrodynamics Research, serves as an Affiliate Faculty member in the Department of Applied Mathematics, and leads the Geospace Data Science Laboratory.
Before joining the Department in 2017, she worked at NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center and NCAR's Institute for Mathematics Applied to Geosciences. She has a PhD in atmospheric sciences from the State University of New York Stony Brook, and master’s and bachelor’s degrees in physics from Nagoya and Hokkaido Universities in Japan.