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Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771

ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM

Monday, March 31, 2008 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium

Barbara Giles

"Heliophysics, What is it and what is it good for anyway!?"

ABSTRACT -- Over the past 50 years a new field of science – Heliophysics – has emerged that addresses the need to understand the Sun and its effects on Earth and the solar system. The space beyond Earth's protective magnetic shield is highly variable and far from benign. The variability of our local, magnetically-variable star has significant impacts on life and technology that are felt on Earth and throughout the solar system.

NASA's role in this new field to answer the fundamental questions:

Goddard Space Flight Center has been at the forefront of this new field of science since its inception. The wide range of Explorer missions, ISTP, the Solar Terrestrial Probes, and the Living with a Star Program are all important parts of Goddard's history and a continuing source of accomplishment. This talk will provide an overview of the vision for Heliophysics science at NASA. I will describe what the current Heliophysics spacecraft in development (SDO, RBSP, IBEX, with emphasis on MMS) will accomplish in this context and I will summarize several areas of technology development needing your attention, right now ... for the future success of this scientific discipline.

SPEAKER -- Dr. Barbara Giles is the Program Scientist for the Magnetospheric MultiScale (MMS) mission at NASA Headquarters. Barbara started her NASA career at Marshall Space Flight Center in 1981 as an undergraduate Co-op student working on the Dynamics Explorer mission. Her Bachelor's in Physics and Mathematics and her M.S. and Ph.D. in Physics were all earned at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. While at Marshall she served with the science teams for the DE, CRRES, Tether-1R, and Polar missions. In 1998, Barbara moved to the Goddard Space Flight Center to join the LENA team for the IMAGE mission. There, she began project scientist work serving as Project Scientist for the Polar mission and later, as Project Scientist for the Geospace missions of the Living with a Star Program. In 2004, Barbara transferred to NASA HQ and now serves as the Program Scientist for the Geospace missions of the Living with a Star Program, Polar, Geotail, and for the MMS mission.




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