Dr Keith Yearby

BSc, PhD

Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering

Senior Research Fellow

k.h.yearby@sheffield.ac.uk
+44 114 222 5238

Full contact details

Dr Keith Yearby
Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering
Amy Johnson Building
Portobello Street
Sheffield
S1 3JD
Profile

Keith Yearby attained his PhD in the Physics department at the University of Sheffield in 1982, using Very Low Frequency (VLF) radio waves to study the earth's magnetosphere. He then spent two years operating the VLF experiments at the British Antarctic Survey base Halley, before returning to work in VLF research at Cambridge and Sheffield. In 1989 he joined the Space Instrumentation Group within Automatic Control and Systems Engineering to work on the development of the Digital Wave Processor (DWP) instrument for the ESA/NASA Cluster mission. Other space instrumentation projects have included hardware and software support for the DWP instrument on the Russian Mars 96 mission, design and construction of electronics for a Faraday Cup instrument on the Varient mission, and the design and manufacture of a DWP instrument for the Chinese Double Star mission. Although based on the Cluster DWP, the Double Star instrument includes the hardware and software for a new spectrum analyser for magnetic field fluctuations.

Research interests

Keith Yearby is presently the technical manager for the Digital Wave Processor instrument. The DWP is the central part of the Cluster Wave Experiment Consortium, a group of instruments from institutes throughout Europe and the USA. His work includes co-ordinating the consortium and to support this a testbed comprising a set of spare instruments and an interface simulator has been developed.

http://www.ssg.group.shef.ac.uk/cluster_mission.phtml

He is also managing the operation of the Digital Wave Processor instrument on the Chinese Double Star mission.
In addition Keith Yearby has a scientific collaboration with British Antarctic Survey involving studies of the ionosphere and magnetosphere by ground based Very Low Frequency (VLF) radio wave observations. Current topics include high time resolution measurements of Doppler shifts on signals from VLF transmitters that have passed through the magnetosphere. This novel technique allows measurements of field line resonances in response to solarwind pressure variations.