Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771
ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM
Monday, May 17, 2010 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium
W. Dean Pesnell
"The Solar Dynamics Observatory: Your On-Orbit Eye on the Sun"
ABSTRACT -- The Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) was launched on February 11, 2010 into partly cloudy skies over Cape Canaveral, Florida. SDO moved into a 28 degree inclined geosynchronous orbit over the longitude of the ground station in New Mexico. SDO is the first Space Weather Mission in NASA's Living With a Star Program. SDO's main goal is to understand and predict those solar variations that influence life on Earth and our 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 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 continues a long tradition of NASA missions providing calibrated solar spectral irradiance data, in this case using multiple measurements of the irradiance and rocket underflights of the spacecraft. The other instruments on SDO will be used to explain and develop predictive models of the solar spectral irradiance in the extreme ultraviolet. 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, its launch, and the data and science it will provide to NASA.
SPEAKER -- Dr. W. Dean Pesnell is the Project Scientist of the Solar Dynamics Observatory. He has published 75 papers in 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 914. 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.