Name: Parker J. Roberts

Education: B.S. Berry College, Ph.D. University of Michigan (Est. Grad. 2025)

Skillset: laser scattering diagnostics, thrust diagnostics, plasma modeling, Hall thruster design/manufacturing/testing, Bayesian uncertainty quantification 

Honors/Awards: 2020 NASA Space Technology Graduate Research Opportunity

Role in JANUS: Graduate Student Researcher, PI: Dr. Benjamin Jorns

Description of Project: With the combined capabilities of two diagnostics – incoherent Thomson scattering and laser-induced fluorescence - I am able to determine local electron and ion properties, respectively, in the plumes of Hall thrusters and other EP technologies. These measurements have helped us quantify the momentum and energy flow in the acceleration zone of Hall thrusters, which both allows direct calibration of engineering simulations as well as provides a dataset for investigating closed-form solutions for the problem of anomalous transport. These transport phenomena govern essentially every aspect of the Hall thruster discharge and are sensitive to facility effects; thus, predictive modeling efforts require this experimental data for validation.