Frederick Moxley III

   Simulations of Exospheres of Mercury and the Moon

2011 NASA/GSFC Lunar & Planetary Science Academy (LPSA)

Greenbelt, Maryland

Mentor, Dr. Rosemary Killen

    The MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry and Ranging (MESSENGER) probe has flown by Mercury three times since its launch in 2004. Each flyby provides scientists with more information about this relatively unknown planet. Determining the composition of Mercury's exosphere and its possible source mechanisms is one task of the MESSENGER mission. Mr. Moxley will support the investigation with modeling and simulations. The project will be to run codes for exospheres of Mercury and the moon, obtain available solar wind data and correlate exosphere data with solar wind data.

    Mr. Moxley has explored his passion for the sciences and mathematics through various avenues.  He completed undergraduate studies in Physics while at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.  Recently he completed his Master of Science degree in Applied Physics and is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in Engineering at Louisiana Tech.  During his first summer of college he accepted a NASA DEVELOP Program scholarship for studies in Geographical Information Systems.  In addition, he was employed by the University of Virginia to work alongside Dr. Matthew Harvey as a teaching assistant of mathematics (Algebra and Trigonometry) through a scholarship from the Appalachian Math and Science Partnership.  During the summer of his Junior year at Virginia Tech, he worked at the Photonics Research Center (PRC) at the United States Military Academy at West Point (USMA).  

    While at Louisiana Tech University he together with Dr. Weizhong Dai, developed a new generalized FDTD-Q method for solving the time-dependent Schrödinger equation with a more relaxed condition for stability than when the central difference approximations for spatial derivatives are employed.  The new FDTD-Q method is explicit and provides a way to calculate the time-evolution of a wave packet without solving linear systems.  This new method reduces the computational cost for multi-dimensional scenarios, and is considered a breakthrough because it presents a numerical method that permits an increase in the time step while remaining stable.  Mr. Moxley has a keen research interest in mathematical physics, vector mechanics and computational physics.