The Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian

The Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian

Support Our Science

Joy Velasquez

Center for Astrophysics

Astrophysicist (Support-Scientist)

Joy Velasquez

joy.velasquez@cfa.harvard.edu

About

Joy Velasquez is an astrophysicist (support-scientist) and software engineer in the Solar and Stellar X-ray Group. He work on the Hinode/XRT and Parker Solar Probe/SWEAP instrument teams, focusing on building scientific software, creating data pipelines, and applying systems engineering to advance our understanding of the Sun. Joy is also the lead developer of XRTpy, an open-source package for analyzing Hinode/XRT solar X-ray data, with ongoing efforts to expand open-source tools for the solar physics community.

B.S. in Physics , UC Santa Cruz

Telescopes and Instruments

Hinode

The Sun is the closest star to Earth, and the single most important influence on the worlds of the Solar System in terms of the light and particles it emits. Studying the Sun, in other words, helps us understand the habitability of Earth, but also other stars elsewhere in the universe. One important solar observatory is the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Hinode spacecraft, which carries three powerful instruments to study the Sun in X-rays, visible light, and ultraviolet light. Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian engineers collaborated in the development of the X-ray Telescope for the spacecraft. Hinode has been observing the Sun continuously since its launch in 2006, providing important day-by-day information about our host star’s activity.

Visit the Hinode/XRT Website

Parker Solar Probe

What is driving the solar wind? Some particles in the Sun’s atmosphere gain enough speed to escape the Sun’s gravitational pull and bombard the worlds of the Solar System, but the processes behind the phenomenon are still mysterious. To solve that mystery, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe spacecraft was built to fly through the Sun’s atmosphere, performing the first up-close solar measurements in history. Scientists and engineers at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian built the Solar Probe Cup (SPC) instrument for the spacecraft. SPC is part of the Solar Wind Electrons Alphas and Protons (SWEAP) instrument suite used to sample particles directly from the Sun’s atmosphere for analysis.

Visit the Parker Solar Probe SWEAP Website