About

Professor David J. McComas is a Professor of Astrophysical Sciences and Participating Faculty in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton University. He served as the Vice President for the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory from 2016 to 2024, during which he was involved in various university and national committees, including the Princeton University President's Cabinet and the NASA Advisory Council. His research interests encompass nearly all aspects of space plasma physics, also known as Heliophysics, including the solar corona, solar wind, terrestrial and planetary magnetospheres, interstellar pickup ions, and the outer heliosphere's interaction with the local interstellar medium. Prof. McComas is an experimentalist who has led or participated in numerous NASA missions, serving as principal investigator for missions such as the Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP), the Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX), and the Two Wide-Angle Imaging Neutral-Atom Spectrometers (TWINS). He has also contributed to the Parker Solar Probe, Ulysses, ACE, New Horizons, and Juno missions, developing instruments and missions for space applications, holding seven patents, and authoring over 750 scientific papers with more than 46,000 citations. He currently teaches the Space Physics Laboratory course at Princeton, providing hands-on experimental experience for undergraduates, and actively advises students at various levels in experimental and observational Space Physics.

Research topics

• Astrobiology
• Astronomy
• Physics
• Geology
• Atmospheric sciences
• Environmental science
• Meteorology

Selected publications

• Parker Solar Probe: Four Years of Discoveries at Solar Cycle Minimum

  Space Science Reviews · 2023 · 147 citations

  • Physics
  • Astronomy
  • Meteorology

  Abstract Launched on 12 Aug. 2018, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe had completed 13 of its scheduled 24 orbits around the Sun by Nov. 2022. The mission’s primary science goal is to determine the structure and dynamics of the Sun’s coronal magnetic field, understand how the solar corona and wind are heated and accelerated, and determine what processes accelerate energetic particles. Parker Solar Probe returned a treasure trove of science data that far exceeded quality, significance, and quantity expectations, leading to a significant number of discoveries reported in nearly 700 peer-reviewed publications. The first four years of the 7-year primary mission duration have been mostly during solar minimum conditions with few major solar events. Starting with orbit 8 (i.e., 28 Apr. 2021), Parker flew through the magnetically dominated corona, i.e., sub-Alfvénic solar wind, which is one of the mission’s primary objectives. In this paper, we present an overview of the scientific advances made mainly during the first four years of the Parker Solar Probe mission, which go well beyond the three science objectives that are: (1) Trace the flow of energy that heats and accelerates the solar corona and solar wind; (2) Determine the structure and dynamics of the plasma and magnetic fields at the sources of the solar wind; and (3) Explore mechanisms that accelerate and transport energetic particles.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Understanding the origins of the heliosphere: integrating observations and measurements from Parker Solar Probe, Solar Orbiter, and other space- and ground-based observatories

  Astronomy and Astrophysics · 2020 · 52 citations

  • Physics
  • Astronomy
  • Astrobiology

  Context. The launch of Parker Solar Probe (PSP) in 2018, followed by Solar Orbiter (SO) in February 2020, has opened a new window in the exploration of solar magnetic activity and the origin of the heliosphere. These missions, together with other space observatories dedicated to solar observations, such as the Solar Dynamics Observatory, Hinode, IRIS, STEREO, and SOHO, with complementary in situ observations from WIND and ACE, and ground based multi-wavelength observations including the DKIST observatory that has just seen first light, promise to revolutionize our understanding of the solar atmosphere and of solar activity, from the generation and emergence of the Sun’s magnetic field to the creation of the solar wind and the acceleration of solar energetic particles. Aims. Here we describe the scientific objectives of the PSP and SO missions, and highlight the potential for discovery arising from synergistic observations. Here we put particular emphasis on how the combined remote sensing and in situ observations of SO, that bracket the outer coronal and inner heliospheric observations by PSP, may provide a reconstruction of the solar wind and magnetic field expansion from the Sun out to beyond the orbit of Mercury in the first phases of the mission. In the later, out-of-ecliptic portions of the SO mission, the solar surface magnetic field measurements from SO and the multi-point white-light observations from both PSP and SO will shed light on the dynamic, intermittent solar wind escaping from helmet streamers, pseudo-streamers, and the confined coronal plasma, and on solar energetic particle transport. Methods. Joint measurements during PSP–SO alignments, and magnetic connections along the same flux tube complemented by alignments with Earth, dual PSP–Earth, and SO-Earth, as well as with STEREO-A, SOHO, and BepiColumbo will allow a better understanding of the in situ evolution of solar-wind plasma flows and the full three-dimensional distribution of the solar wind from a purely observational point of view. Spectroscopic observations of the corona, and optical and radio observations, combined with direct in situ observations of the accelerating solar wind will provide a new foundation for understanding the fundamental physical processes leading to the energy transformations from solar photospheric flows and magnetic fields into the hot coronal plasma and magnetic fields and finally into the bulk kinetic energy of the solar wind and solar energetic particles. Results. We discuss the initial PSP observations, which already provide a compelling rationale for new measurement campaigns by SO, along with ground- and space-based assets within the synergistic context described above.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• N. A. Schwadron

  University of New Hampshire

  737 shared

• F. Allegrini

  418 shared

• P. W. Valek

  Southwest Research Institute

  399 shared

• F. Bagenal

  371 shared

• H. O. Funsten

  New Mexico Consortium

  330 shared

• M. Bzowski

  Centrum Badań Kosmicznych

  326 shared

• S. A. Fuselier

  The University of Texas at San Antonio

  300 shared

• R. W. Ebert

  Southwest Research Institute

  278 shared

Labs

• Department of Astrophysical SciencesPI

Education

• M.S. & Ph.D., Earth, Planetary, and Space Sciences

  University of California Los Angeles

  1986

• B.S., Physics

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  1980

Awards & honors

• National Academy of Science's Arctowski Medal (2023)
• European Geosciences Union's Hannes Alfvén Medal (2022)
• Scientific Committee on Solar-Terrestrial Physics (SCOSTEP)…
• AGU's Eugene Parker Lecture (2018)
• COSPAR Space Science Award (2014)

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