Carey said their primary interests are manufacturing and life support processes on the International Space Station, NASA's space shuttle, and future space projects. The simulations also have close interplay with terrestrial experiments involving free surface phenomena on thin films, which are used to manufacture computer chips. Carey also mentioned the possibility of modeling fires with the code, particularly oil fires on water, where surface tension plays a role. Probing the geodynamo Like the sun, the Earth is among the majority of solar system planets possessing magnetic fields that originate from self-sustaining dynamos. A major finding is that the Earth's inner core rotates faster than the outer core, matching seismological observations for the first time.
Simulations show the inner core setting outer core fluids in motion to create the dynamo.
The team's dynamo models exhibit occasional reversals in magnetic polarity when the heat flow on the boundary between the liquid core and solid mantle is spatially heterogeneous. These results suggest that thermal coupling between the core and the mantle may be the ultimate cause of geomagnetic polarity reversals. The sheer mass of collected data makes for a computational challenge. His team is moving towards giving scientists real-time processing capabilities with a Scalable SAR Software Suite that works with multiple types of SAR data and in a heterogeneous computing environment. Advancing the Suite are three critical SAR applications.