Investigation of the Magnetosphere of Ganymede with Galileo's Energetic Particle Detector

Ph.D. dissertation by Shawn M. Stone, University of Kansas, 1999.

Copyright 1999 by Shawn M. Stone.  Used with permission.

Dedication

This dissertation is dedicated to all of my family, past, present, and future. To the past, my Great Aunt Deva and my Grandmother Ava whose love and guidance were unshaken even though I was the mouthiest kid alive. To the present, my mother Donna and my brother Sam who believed in me even when I did not. To the future, my fiancee Susan, her parents Charles and Mary, her sisters Peg and Ellen, and to our children whose twinkle in my eye gets brighter everyday.

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank my research advisor, Dr. Thomas P. Armstrong, for plucking me out of his computational physics class and plopping me down into the greatest adventure and learning experience of my life. His patience, support, and encouragement of this work and of my professional development will never be forgotten. I also wish to thank my committee members who unknowingly agreed to referee the largest paperweight ever constructed: Dr. Thomas Cravens, Dr. Barbara Anthony-Twarog, Dr. Donna Tucker, and Dr. Kyle Camarada.

There are a few graduate student colleagues that I would like to mention with special distinction for a variety of reasons. I would like to thank my fellow cohort Tina Hebert for her friendship and encouragement. We surmounted many a struggle together over the past four years (graduate school was hard!). Thanks for being there, Tina. I would like to thank Juan A. Gomez for being the best summertime roommate ever. If it wasn’t for Juan, and the many dissertation breaks we took, I believe that the many bouts of dissertation Tourette’s I suffered would have got the best of me. To Juan I would just like to say PRICE CHOPPER TONIGHT WE RIDE!!!!!! I would like to give a special heartfelt thanks to Chris Brull. He went above and beyond the call of duty many times preparing me for my work with the Galileo Project. Also, Chris turned me on to LINUX which I will never forgive him for (sound card still doesn’t work). To Achille Maurellis I would like to thank for being a shoulder to cry on. Thanks for emotional support, Achille. I would like to thank Tim Duman for his friendship and many conversations about the world in general. Thanks for showing me it's fun to disagree, Tim. I would like to thank Capp Yess also for his encouragement and for just plain listing to the ranting and ravings of a madman.

I would like to thank the entire Galileo EPD team for their support and constructive criticism of this work. I would especially like to thank Don Williams for his encouragement and understanding, and for his continued support both financially and emotionally. I would like to thank Teck Choo for his friendship and help with LGAPROC.

For all her help with this dissertation I would like to thank Tizby Hunt-Ward for her editing and good comments. She is the savior of many a graduate student. On a personal note, I would like to thank Tizby for being such a great person and not being scared of telling me where to go. Oh, yes, for also taking care of our cats on many occasions. Mr. Pink loves you, Tizby. A very special thanks goes to Sue Slagle for putting up with me and the writing of this leviathan for the past year. Also, she did a lot of work on helping me finish it up and getting it out the door.

Thanks to Fundamental Technologies for the use of their computational power in the generating of the simulated data sets. Without 10 computers to run on, I would be defending this dissertation in the year 1910 (Y2K joke, ha). Also, thanks to D. A. Gurnett for the plasma wave plots he provided (Figures 1.18 and 1.19); they were a great help. Finally, many thanks to Steve Joy at JPL for helping me understand some of the more complicated coordinate transformations and for providing me with the magnetic field data for the Ganymede encounters.

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