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Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771

ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM

Monday, December 1, 2008 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium

image of next Goes in orbit

Dennis Chesters

"The GOES Experience"

ABSTRACT -- The GOES satellites are a series of 17 national observatories managed through launch by NASA and operated by NOAA. The series spans 5 generations from 1968 to 2030. These satellites continuously monitor the real-time "weather" of the sun, the earth, and the magnetosphere with a half-dozen instruments. They also provide several health-and-safety communications services for the western hemisphere. The most familiar product from GOES is the clouds-in-motion movie shown on TV every day. Several enhanced videos will be presented to demonstrate the values of continuous earth-observation.

The GOES experience has its war-stories. The asbestos ban blew up a rocket. That sticky solar array. Those faulty light bulbs. Sunburned and overheated and blinded! The warehouse in outer space. The lunatic super-geosynchronous graveyard. Focusing X-rays with a donut. Mapping lightning during the day. Stop the EPA from shutting down Oklahoma! Pronounce "boustrophedon".

The GOES experience is also like a soap opera -- the young NASA and NOAA meet and have children, but he gambles away the money, she leaves with the children but no child-support, the 3rd generation nearly dies of neglect, then they gradually reconcile, move back in together, and try again. Many of NASA's most prominent employees have worked on GOES, and so can you.

SPEAKER -- Dennis Chesters is the GOES project scientist at Goddard, appointed in 1992 during the "BlunderSat" episode. He operates an automated ground station that offers scientific- and pop-quality real-time GOES images at goes.gsfc.nasa.gov, one of NASA's most popular web sites at 40 GigaBytes/day. In the 1980's, Dr. Chesters studied climate and radiation from space, particularly the most dangerous greenhouse gas: water vapor. In 1978, he was originally hired by Goddard to demonstrate the meteorological value of the first infrared sounder on a GOES satellite. He has a 1971 PhD in Astronomy from the University of Maryland, and a 1965 BS in Physics from the Illinois Institute of Technology.


Engineering Colloquium home page: https://ecolloq.gsfc.nasa.gov