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Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771

ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM

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

photo of John Wood

H. John Wood

"Geysers on Mars and other Strange Results from the Mars Observer Camera "

ABSTRACT -- Among the hundreds of thousands of pictures taken by the cameras aboard the Mars Observer are some remarkable images that show the effects of thawing at the high latitude sub-polar regions. The regions are covered by a light dusting of CO2 snow. As the spring thaw approaches, sub-surface ice sublimes suddenly and produces geysers carrying dark dust high into the air. The prevailing winds carry the plumes downwind as they precipitate out onto the snow.

These and other remarkable pictures reveal the interesting nature of the Martian surface.

SPEAKER -- Dr. H. John Wood is an astronomer and optical engineer at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. He serves as Optics Lead Engineer on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Project. He led the teams which diagnosed and fixed the problems with the Hubble optics. He also served as Lead Optical Engineer on the Mars Observer Laser Altimeter and on the Diffuse Infrared Background Experiment of the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE). He is currently Science Liaison for the Instrument Synthesis & Analysis Laboratory for new Earth Science and Space Science at Goddard.

A graduate of Swarthmore College, Dr. Wood earned the M.A. and Ph.D. in Astronomy from Indiana University. He served on the astronomy faculty of the University of Virginia, had a Fulbright Research Fellowship at the University Observatory in Vienna, Austria, was a staff astronomer at the European Southern Observatory in Chile, and served as assistant director at Cerro Tololo Interamerican Observatory. He has been at Goddard for twenty years.

Dr. Wood has received a NASA exceptional service medal and a NASA exceptional achievement medal for work on COBE and HST.


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