Galvin's early research included working on the Ultra-Low Energy Charge Analyzer (ULECA) instrumentation for two of the NASA-ESA International Sun-Earth Explorer spacecraft (ISEE-1 and ISEE-3) with which she examined the ions upstream of Earth's bow shock[5] and used changes in the charge state of heavy ions to track the solar wind ionization temperature.
[7] Galvin worked on the Solar Wind Ion Composition Spectrometer (SWICS) instrumentation for the Ulysses spacecraft that was a shared venture between NASA and the European Space Agency.
Galvin was the lead for the Suprathermal Ion Composition Spectrometer (STICS) on the NASA Wind spacecraft.
Galvin is the principal investigator for the PLasma and SupraThermal Ion Composition (PLASTIC) instruments on the two Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory STEREO spacecraft.
[11][12] In 2009, data from PLASTIC provided the solar wind measurements for the first three-dimensional images of a coronal mass ejection from the sun.