Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771
ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM
Monday, March 5, 2007 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium
W. Dean Pesnell
"The Solar Dynamics Observatory: Your Eye on the Sun"
ABSTRACT -- The Sun hiccups and satellites die. That is what NASA's Living With a Star (LWS) Program is all about. The Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) is the first Space Weather Mission in LWS. SDO's main goal is to understand, driving towards a predictive capability, those solar variations that influence life on Earth and humanity's technological systems. The SDO science investigations will determine how the Sun's magnetic field is generated and structured, how this stored magnetic energy is released into the heliosphere and geospace as the solar wind, energetic particles, and variations in the solar irradiance. The SDO mission consists of three scientific investigations (AIA, EVE, and HMI), a spacecraft bus, and a dedicated Ka-band ground station to handle the 150 Mbps data flow. SDO is scheduled to launch in 2008 on an Atlas V rocket from the Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canaveral, Florida. The satellite will fly in a 28 degree inclined geosynchronous orbit about the longitude of New Mexico. GSFC built the spacecraft and will operate the spacecraft over its five-year mission life, commanding the spacecraft, receiving the science data and forwarding it to the science teams. The science teams at LMSAL, LASP, and Stanford are responsible for processing, analyzing, distributing, and archiving the science data. We will talk about the building of SDO and the data and science it will provide to NASA.
SPEAKER -- W. Dean Pesnell is the Project Scientist of the Solar Dynamics Observatory. He has published 70 papers in a variety of research areas, including variable stars, the Sun-Earth connection, quantum mechanics, and meteors in planetary atmospheres. He received his Ph.D. in 1983 from the University of Florida. After a post-doc at the University of Colorado and a visiting professorship at New Mexico State University, Dean came to Goddard as a contractor in 1994. He formed Nomad Research, Inc. in 1995 to do research work with Goddard. One series of contracts was to design the Living With a Star Geospace missions. He started work on SDO in 2004 and became the Project Scientist in 2005.