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Dr. Sandel's interests include the atmospheres of the outer planets and their satellites Titan and Triton, and Earth's plasmasphere. He has developed an extreme ultraviolet imager for the IMAGE Mission, an element of NASA's Medium-Class Explorer Program. Launched in March 2000, this instrument tracks changes in the distribution of singly-ionized helium in Earth's plasmasphere by imaging 304-A sunlight that has been scattered by the helium ions. The goal is a better understanding of the response of the plasmasphere to external forcing. Sandel is a member of the Deep Space 1 Science Team. He focuses his interest on the Miniature Integrated Camera Spectrometer (MICAS) observations of Comet Borrelly. Sandel interprets Voyager UVS observations of airglow emissions and of solar and stellar occultations to define the temperature, structure, and composition of the outer planets' atmospheres, and the interaction between them and the planets' magnetospheres. Dr. Sandel is extending his earlier work on the energetics and dynamics of the Io plasma torus using the EUV Channel on Galileo, and with UVSTAR. UVSTAR is an EUV imaging spectrograph constructed by the University of Arizona and the University of Trieste to study the Jovian system, concentrating on the torus, from the Shuttle. To characterize the outer heliosphere and its interaction with the interstellar medium, Sandel analyzes Voyager UVS maps of sky background H Lyman alpha emissions.
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