Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771

ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM

Monday, September 27, 2004 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium

Greg Garbe

"An Overview of NASA's Solar Sail Project"

ABSTRACT -- Solar sails have been studied for a variety of missions and have the potential to provide cost effective, propellantless propulsion that enables longer on-station operation, increased scientific payload mass fraction, and access to previously inaccessible orbits (e. g., non-Keplerian, mid to high solar latitudes, etc.). Research being conducted by the In-Space Propulsion Technologies (ISPT) Project is at the forefront of NASA's efforts to mature propulsion technologies that will enable or enhance a variety of science missions. Solar sail propulsion systems will be required to meet the challenge of monitoring and predicting space weather by the Science Missions Directorate's Living with a Star (LWS) program. Near-to-mid-term mission needs include understanding the temporal/spatial relationships of solar storms, monitoring of solar activity, and observations at high solar latitudes. Work currently funded by the ISPT's Solar Sail Propulsion (SSP) technology area is centered around the quantitative demonstration of scalability of present solar sail propulsion system designs and concepts to future mission requirements through ground testing of hardware, computational modeling and analytical simulations. This talk will give an overview SSP's main development tasks, how this work will lead to a flight validation and ultimately scale to the size needed for the Solar Polar Imager and L1-Diamond missions.

SPEAKER -- Dr. Garbe received his Bachelor of Science in Physics from the University of Washington in 1986. In 1990 he received his Ph.D. from the University of New Hampshire for his work on experimental space plasma research using sounding rockets. Dr. Garbe began a postdoctoral position at the University of Calgary in 1991. During his nine years at the University of Calgary, he participated in several of the Canadian Space Agency's Space Science Program missions, which ultimately led to his being appointed as the Deputy Principle Investigator of the Thermal Plasma Analyzer (TPA) flight project. The TPA instrument was launched on July 4, 1998, aboard the Nozomi (former, Planet-B, Mission to Mars) satellite. Nozomi's original trans-Martian trajectory was flawed due to a faulty thruster firing but a secondary trajectory was plotted to deliver the satellite to Mars in December 2003. Unfortunately Nozomi was rendered inoperative due to damage to its central processor from a solar storm in March 2003. In August 1999, Dr. Garbe joined the Space Plasma Physics Group within the Space Science Laboratory at Marshall Space Flight Center. He moved to position of Lead Systems Engineer for the In-Space Propulsion Technologies Project (ISPT) in December 2001. He is a member of the ST9 Solar Sail Flight Validation core team and is responsible for the formulation and technical oversight of flight applications of Solar Sail Propulsion for ISPT. Dr. Garbe is a member of the Kiwanis Club of Huntsville where he helps raise funds to support local youth activities such as the Boys and Girls Club, four area high school Key Clubs, and community pediatrics clinics.