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Schedule including this lecture.
Goddard Space Flight Center Engineering Colloquium
Date: Monday, September 23, 2002
NASA's New Horizons mission will be the first mission to the Pluto-Charon binary planet and the Kuiper Belt. The reconnaissance of Pluto-Charon and the Kuiper Belt was recently ranked at the top of the priority list of the National Academy's Decadal Survey for Planetary Science. NASA/Goddard is playing a major role in the mission by providing one of the prime scientific investigations on the mission. In this talk, I will describe the scientific objectives of this exciting mission of exploration, as well as the mission's implementation strategy, its payload, and current development status
Dr. Alan Stern is the Director of the Southwest Research Institute's Department of Space Studies in Boulder, Colorado, and principle investigator for the New Horizons mission. From 1991 to 1994 he was the leader of SwRI's Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences group at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. Before receiving his doctorate in 1989, Dr. Stern completed a master's degree in aerospace engineering and then spent seven years as an aerospace systems engineer, concentrating on spacecraft and payload systems at the NASA Johnson Space Center, Martin Marietta Aerospace, and the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at the University of Colorado. He has published over 130 technical papers and 20 popular articles and written two books, The U.S. Space Program After Challenger and Pluto & Charon: Ice Worlds on the Ragged Edge of the Solar System. In 1995 he was selected to be a Space Shuttle mission specialist finalist. He is an instrument rated commercial pilot and flight instructor, with both powered and sailplane ratings.
Colloquium Committee Sponsor: Dr. Jan Kalshoven
Engineering Colloquium home page: https://ecolloq.gsfc.nasa.gov