Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771

ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM

Monday, January 22, 2007 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium

Mike Kaiser

"STEREO-A New way to View the Sun"

ABSTRACT -- The twin STEREO spacecraft were launched from Kennedy Space Center on October 26, 2006 by a Delta II rocket into a series of eccentric Earth orbits which culminated just yesterday (January 21) with flybys of the moon used to change their orbits into heliocentric. In their final orbits around the sun, one spacecraft will move ahead of Earth in its orbit and the other will fall behind. From these ever-widening vantage points, the identically equipped spacecraft will be able to triangulate on solar coronal mass ejections (CMEs) to provide much better estimates of their speed and direction than can be obtained from Earth-orbiting spacecraft, particularly for those CMEs destined to impact Earth. Each STEREO spacecraft is equipped with 16 instruments including extreme ultraviolet, coronagraph and heliospheric imagers, radio astronomy burst trackers, and several in situ fields and particles detectors. These new three dimensional and simultaneous multi-point measurements of CMEs will undoubtedly lead to a more complete understanding of their evolution as they move through the space between the sun an Earth.

SPEAKER -- Michael L. Kaiser is a research scientist with the Heliophysics Science Division at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. He is the Project Scientist for the STEREO Mission and is also the Deputy Principal Investigator of the STEREO WAVES investigation. In addition, he is the Principal Investigator of the WAVES experiment on the NASA Wind spacecraft. He is also a co-investigator on the Voyager Planetary Radio Astronomy (PRA) team, the Ulysses Unified Radio And Plasma Wave experiment (URAP) and the Cassini Radio and Plasma Wave Science (RPWS) team.

Kaiser received his M.S. degree in Astronomy from the University of Maryland in 1971. His research interests include low frequency radio astronomy with particular emphasis on planetary and solar emissions. He is an author on approximately 225 scientific publications and has received the NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement medal and numerous group achievement awards. He is a member of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), International Union of Radio Science (URSI), European Geophysical Union (EGU), American Astronomical Society/Solar Physics Division and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.