Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771
ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM
Monday, April 18, 2011 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium
Michael Hesse
"Space Weather: Its Effects and How to Tackle Them"
ABSTRACT -- NASA missions, as well as many other aspects of modern society, are susceptible to space weather effects. Pertinent space weather effects include high-energy electromagnetic and particle radiation, changes of atmospheric drag, reduction of GPS accuracy or complete loss of GPS signals, communication outages, and the generation of potentially harmful DC currents in our electric power grid. Beginning in the early 1990s, researchers and government have been increasingly aware of the need to understand the causes of space weather, and to find ways to mitigate deleterious effects associated with it. New research and development programs have been created to address space weather primarily at NASA but also at other agencies. This investment has been very fruitful by generating a new class of entirely new space weather specification and forecast capabilities. This presentation provides an overview of space weather causes and effects, as well as of research and development to forecast and mitigate space weather effects. It will include a discussion of modern space weather analysis and forecasting, and conclude by pointing out paths into the future.
SPEAKER -- Dr. Michael Hesse received his doctoral degree in Theoretical Physics at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum in 1988. His present position is that of Chief of the Space Weather Laboratory at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. In this role he is responsible for a staff of 65 civil servants, university scientists, and contractors engaged in space research, instrumentation development, and space environment forecasting for NASA and partners. Dr. Hesse is the founding Director of the Community Coordinated Modeling Center (CCMC), for which he received NASA's Outstanding Leadership Medal in 2007. The CCMC is a multi-agency activity with the objective to bring to bear modern space research model on the needs of space weather forecasters and the research community. Furthermore, Dr. Hesse's responsibilities include that of Lead Co-Investigator for Theory and Modeling for NASA's Magnetospheric MultiScale (MMS) mission. Dr. Hesse serves or has served on numerous steering and advisory committees, most recently on the steering committee of the 2013 Heliophysics Decadal Survey. Dr. Hesse remains a publishing research scientist, with more than 200 papers in the scientific literature. In addition to Space Weather-related topics, his research interests include the theory and modeling of kinetic space plasma processes throughout the Heliophysics domain. Dr. Hesse was elected Fellow of the American Geophysical Union in 2010.