European Planetary Science Congress - 05 July 2010
Europlanet honours Jean Lilensten with first Prize for Excellence in Public Engagement with Planetary Science
The first Europlanet prize for excellence in public engagement with planetary science has been awarded to Dr Jean Lilensten of the Laboratoire de Planétologie de Grenoble. For more than 10 years, Dr Lilensten has worked to share the magic of planetary aurorae with school children and members of the public across Europe, using his ‘planeterrella’ experiment.
... Aurorae, or the Northern and Southern Lights, are beautiful green, red and blue lightshows that occur around the Earth’s magnetic poles. They provide scientists with crucial information about the space environment surrounding the Earth, our ‘space weather’.
The planeterrella is inspired by experiments carried out at the turn of the last century by the Norwegian physicist, Kristian Birkeland, who first described how the Northern Lights were caused by the solar wind’s interaction with the Earth’s magnetic field. In a series of experiments, Birkeland aimed a beam of electrons at a magnetized sphere (terrella) inside a glass vacuum chamber and succeeded in recreating the ethereal glow of the aurora at the sphere’s poles.
In 1996, Dr Lilensten visited Terje Brundtland, who was restoring apparatus that Birkeland had used in 1913 for his largest experiment. Following the visit, Dr Lilensten built several terrellas with colleagues and students. From this series of experiments, he envisaged a portable, flexible version that could be used both as a scientific tool and for public engagement.
In addition to demonstrating how the Earth’s aurora are created, the planeterrella can show auroral effects at Uranus and Neptune, the Van Allen radiation belts, the magnetopause and various effects seen around highly magnetized stars, such as stellar ring currents and jets.
