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I study plasma physics of the heliosphere, including the solar wind, planetary magnetospheres, and planetary ionospheres. Topics of particular interest include: high-frequency plasma waves, wave-particle interactions, solar wind dynamics, cosmic dust and debris impacts on spacecraft, cold plasma dynamics in the Earth's magnetosphere, and spacecraft charging. To enable these studies and others, I develop scientific instrumentation for spacecraft, focusing on the measurement of electric and magnetic fields as well as on signal processing techniques and hardware.

Current instrumentation projects include the Debris and meteoroid Environment Sensor (DEnTS) near-Earth debris detector, the Atmospheric Electrodynamics probe for THERmal plasma (AETHER) instrument on the Geospace Dynamics (GDC) mission, the Lunar Surface Electromagnetics Experiment (LuSEE), the Climatology of Anthropogenic and Natural VLF wave Activity in Space (CANVAS) cubesat, and the Rapid Active Plasma Sounder (RAPS) for the SYSTER/COUSIN sounding rocket.

Completed instrumentation projects include the FIELDS instrument on the Parker Solar Probe mission, the FIELDS instrument on the Magnetospheric Multiscale mission (MMS), and the Electric Fields and Waves (EFW) instrument on the Van Allen Probes mission.

Selected Recent Publications:

Malaspina, D. M., Szalay, J. R., Mazurkiewicz, A., Lee-Bellows, D., and Landis, M. E., “A Search for Meteoroid Streams and Their Sources in the Near-Sun Zodiacal Dust Cloud”, The Astrophysical Journal, vol. 992, no. 1, Art. no. 76, IOP, 2025. doi:10.3847/1538-4357/ae0184.

Malaspina, D. M., “Frequency-dispersed Ion Acoustic Waves in the Near-Sun Solar Wind: Signatures of Impulsive Ion Beams”, The Astrophysical Journal, vol. 969, no. 1, Art. no. 60, IOP, 2024. doi:10.3847/1538-4357/ad4b12.

Malaspina, D. M., “Magnetospheric Cold Plasma Diagnostics Using High Altitude GNSS Signals”, Journal of Geophysical Research (Space Physics), vol. 130, no. 3, Wiley, pp. 2024JA033426, 2025. doi:10.1029/2024JA033426.