Colorado College Bulletin

Cosmic Revelations

By BARRY NOREEN

Michelle Thomsen’s journey began in Colorado’s dry-land wheat country. Before long, her career will take her to the rings of Saturn. 

Thomsen  ’71 is the leader of the Space Physics Team and Atmospheric Sciences Group at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Recently she was named a fellow of the American Geophysical Union, an honor bestowed on just 39 of the AGU’s 39,000 members this year. 

She was elected as a fellow for research into the physics of collisionless shocks and Jovian and terrestrial magnetospheres. In English, that means Thomsen is able to extract meaning from what, for most of us, is "The Void."

Thomsen is immersed in several projects now, including one that receives data from the Cassini mission, perhaps the most ambitious space exploration yet undertaken. The Cassini craft will cover 2.2 billion miles by the time it completes its work: orbiting Venus twice, orbiting Earth, then using Earth’s gravity to propel itself past Jupiter and on to Saturn. 

The Cassini will travel too far away from the sun (1 billion miles) for solar panels to be of much help, so the craft’s power package includes 72 pounds of plutonium, the largest payload of radioactive material ever launched into space. 

Thomsen, born in Burlington on Colorado’s eastern plains, specializes in the study of magnetospheres -- the “bubbles” of ionized gases and sub-atomic particles created by a planet’s magnetic field. 

“Our mission is aimed at studying the planet’s magnetosphere,” Thomsen said during an April visit to CC. “Cassini should encounter Saturn in 2004. It just passed Jupiter.” 

In several years of orbit there, the craft will send back volumes of data concerning the plasma content of Jupiter’s magnetosphere, which Thomsen refers to as a sort of cosmic sink. 

“It’s a pretty interesting balance, what’s going on there in the rings,” she says. For Los Alamos, Thomsen also supervises the monitoring of data sent to Earth from satellites orbiting the planet every 24 hours, about 35,000 kilometers above the surface. “It’s a very interesting, very dynamic part of the magnetosphere,” she says. 

The winds cast forth from solar storms can create havoc with satellites, as well as ground-based facilities such as power distribution systems and oil pipelines -- some of the ground Thomsen covered in a seminar she gave during her visit. 

While Cassini merely did a fly-by of Jupiter, the planet is one of Thomsen’s old stomping grounds, scientifically speaking. She did her doctoral studies at the University of Iowa, where she analyzed data from Pioneer 10, a Jupiter mission in the 1970s. Later on, Thomsen did post-doctoral work at the Max Planck Institute for Aeronomy in Lindau, Germany. She has been at Los Alamos, where she and her husband raised two children, since 1981. 

In her work, she routinely tests other scientists’ hypotheses, analyzing data from solar events as they bombard the atmosphere. Working with satellites, solar winds, and distant planets may have exotic appeal, but Thomsen says instead of cosmic revelations, the work is more about a “step-by-step exploration of a concept.” 

In a modest reflection on her career, Thomsen says “Everything has been a wonderful accident.” She came to CC as a Boettcher scholar, having graduated from Denver’s Lincoln High School. “I was thinking of majoring in chemistry, but I discovered the physics lab smelled so much better than the chemistry lab,” she says with a laugh. 

Although Thomsen says she “enjoyed all the professors I has at CC,” it was physics professor Dick Hilt who made the biggest impression. 

The feeling is mutual. For Hilt, Thomsen is an unforgettable student. “She’s the only student whose parents I’ve written to thank for sending their daughter to CC.  Getting to work with Michelle was part of my pay,” says Hilt, still a member of the CC Physics Department. 

Surveying Thomsen’s career, Hilt says, “You could say she is at the top 1 percent in her field.” Thomsen, who graduated Phi Beta Kappa, is the daughter of a music teacher. She believes strongly in a liberal arts education, and even that some in the scientific disciplines often overlook liberal arts graduates when it comes to recruiting talent to their fields. 

“I know how to learn and how to think and that’s what you learn at a school like this,” Thomsen says of CC. “All you have to do is apply yourself.” 

That has turned out to be motherly advice. Thomsen’s son, Davis Thomsen, may not need a plasma spectrometer to follow her footprints -- yet. He graduates from CC this year -- with a degree in physics. 

“I encouraged him to go to liberal arts schools,” a proud Thomsen says, “but I was surprised when he decided to come here.” 

If Davis Thomsen is not a chip off the old block, he’s at least a freed electron in mom’s magnetosphere. As Hilt noted of Davis’ post-graduate prospects: “He’s been accepted everywhere he’s applied.”

Back to Index