The University of Delaware is committed to excellence in undergraduate and graduate education, research and service. From its roots as a private academy in 1743, the institution today is a research-intensive, technologically advanced university with global impact.

University of Delaware

New Row

Contact expert @[Full Name](fullname), @[Job Title](job_title) at @[Organization](organization) for media, speaking, professional opportunities and more.

@[Full Name](fullname) at @[Organization](organization) | Contact Form

Expert Inquiry

Open Sans

Anisotropic Heating and Cooling within Interplanetary Coronal Mass Ejection Sheath Plasma

Space-qualifying silicon photonic modulators and circuits

HelioSwarm: A Multipoint, Multiscale Mission to Characterize Turbulence

Regulation of Proton–α Differential Flow by Compressive Fluctuations and Ion-scale Instabilities in the Solar Wind

The Future of Heliophysics Research through Targeted use of Constellations

The Solar Wind at Mesoscales — Revealing the Missing Link

The Trans-Heliospheric Survey

After receiving his Bachelor of Science in Physics and Mathematical Sciences from Carnegie Mellon and his PhD in Astronomy and Astrophysics from Harvard University, Bennett A. Maruca became a Charles Hard Townes postdoctoral fellow at the Space Science Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. Ben now serves as an Associate Professor in the University of Delaware's Department of Physics and Astronomy. His research focuses on the sun, the solar wind and other space plasmas. He is particularly interested in how the solar wind is first heated and accelerated near the sun and then changes and evolves as it expands through the solar system. Ben is a member of the science teams for multiple current and upcoming NASA spacecraft, including Wind, Parker Solar Probe, and HelioSwarm, and he is a recipient of the Antarctic Service Medal and NASA's Silver Achievement Medal. He also serves as an associate director of the Delaware Space Grant Consortium and is currently mentoring over twenty undergraduate students developing experiments to fly into space to observe Earth's ionosphere. One of those projects, the Delaware Atmospheric Plasma Probe Experiment (DAPPEr), is a student-led CubeSat mission that, upon its launch, will become Delaware's first orbital spacecraft.

​Solar Wind

Solar Physics

Heliophysics

Space Engineering

Space Education

Space Instrumentation

Langmuir Probes

Faraday Cups

Coulomb Collisions

Sounding Rockets

Kinetic Microinstabilities

CubeSats

Lunar Eclipses

Solar Eclipses

Space Mission Development

Space Plasmas

Ionosphere

Science and Religion

English

University of Delaware Faculty Profile 

ResearchGate Citations

The Mysterious Green Flash at Sunset – The Science Behind the Myth and Where to See It

The best reason to see the imminent total lunar eclipse

A dramatic total lunar eclipse is coming. You don't want to miss it.

The space station has a risky leak. How bad is it?

UD student club building first Delaware spacecraft

What is a geomagnetic storm? Why you saw the northern lights

It won’t be an aurora encore for Philly this weekend, but a rare comet will be visible

Out-of-this-world leadership | UDaily

Why Earthlings are safe when huge solar storms strike our planet

April 8 solar eclipse: visibility, safety and watch parties

A total solar eclipse will occur on April 8. All the info on path, time and solar glasses

Associate Professor, Physics and Astronomy

This is the DAS Meeting from 5/19/2020. Dr. Bennett A. Maruca from University of Delaware presented "Exploring the Origins of the Solar Wind with NASA's Parker Solar Probe."  This talk features great details about the Sun, the Solar atmosphere, coronal mass ejections, how the solar wind interacts with the earth, and humanity's efforts to study it.  It includes some of the latest research into the solar wind and how the Parker Solar Probe is designed to study it.

2020 05 19 DAS Meeting - Exploring the Origins of the Solar Wind with NASA's Parker Solar Probe

Bennett Maruca | UC Berkeley | Collisional Thermalization of Hydrogen and Helium

Select Inquiry Type