M.S. Candidate
IN September 1964 TIMOTHY HANKINS '62 returned to Hanover after two years' service as a gunnery officer on a Navy destroyer to begin studies toward a Master of Science degree in radiophysics. As an undergraduate Engineering Sciences major with a special liking for electrical engineering and an interest in science, this Thayer School offering for men primarily research oriented seemed to meet his needs.
"I never suspected I'd be involved in the problem the way that I am, because at the outset I had no specific problem," Tim remarks now as his Thayer work nears a successful ending. However, he hadn't been long on the scene before he and a backscatter radar acquired by Thayer at the conclusion of the 1957-58 International Geophysical Year were brought together by his adviser, Professor Millett Morgan - and Tim had his problem: repair and install the intricate equipment, put it into operation, and get the material for a thesis project through use of the apparatus.
The project was Tim's alone. It took him every day into the foothills in the wooded Etna section of Hanover where the Radiophysics Laboratory had established a field site - one quarter mile up the trail from the nearest paved road. Working as a half-time research assistant (on an Air Force contract grant), it took him almost two years to get the equipment in full operation. The other half of his time was spent on his course work in electrical engineering and radiophysics.
Tim's thesis topic is "A study of largescale moving irregularities in the ionosphere" - such as, he explains, "a wavelike motion of ionization which appears to travel from the auroral zones southward apparently initiated by solar flares."
"The observations I made with the backscatter radar were done simultaneously with a vertical incidence sounder, (Thayer has three in operation- Etna, Brattleboro, and Durham)," he explained. "I've done extensive computer analysis of the data including computer synthesis of the oblique propagation of signals from the backscatter sounder. The object of the thesis is to obtain a correlation between the two methods of probing the ionosphere."
New vertical incidence sounders are being built at the Radiophysics Laboratory now to continue observations, and Tim's data reduction techniques will be used. His work will probably be picked up and expanded by a Ph.D. candidate.
Tim will be moving on this year to the University of California at San Diego where he has already been accepted as a Ph.D. degree candidate in Applied Electrophysics. It is Thayer's philosophy to urge a man to continue advanced studies elsewhere after six years on the Hanover scene. Besides that, San Diego is strong in the area of Tim's major interest. As a starter, he feels, he'll be involved with interferometric studies of the solar wind by scintillations of radio stars.
Tim, the son of Frank H. Hankins Jr. '28 of Franklin Lakes, N. J., thinks "the involvement in basic research (at Thayer) has been exciting. I look forward to more of it!"
