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Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771

ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM

photo of Stacy Weinstein-Weiss

Monday, January 23, 2012 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium

Stacy Weinstein-Weiss

"The DAWN Mission"

ABSTRACT -- For the first time in history, NASA plans to orbit the two most massive main-belt asteroids: Vesta and Ceres. Comparing these different worlds will allow insights into the conditions and processes that occurred during the dawn of the solar system. The Dawn mission launched in 2007 and, through the use of ion propulsion, arrived in Vesta orbit in July 2011. The mission has revealed a heavily cratered, mysteriously grooved, and tortured body with the second largest mountain in the solar system. The spacecraft is currently in its lowest Vesta orbit (~210 km altitude). Dawn will depart Vesta for dwarf planet Ceres in July 2012, arriving in February 2015. This talk will introduce the Dawn mission and discuss some of the recent findings at Vesta.

SPEAKER -- Stacy Weinstein-Weiss joined the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1987 after graduating from MIT with a degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics Engineering. She has worked in a variety of areas, including mission design/trajectory design, mission engineering, spacecraft system engineering, project engineering, line management, and project management. Stacy spent 4 years on the Cassini Mission Design team as a trajectory analyst and mission engineer. She was a co-founder of the Pluto Express mission that eventually launched as New Horizons. She was the Project Engineer for Mars Sample Return and also worked as the lead systems engineer for the sample capture,rendezvous, and Earth-return system. On Mars Exploration Rover, she tested airbags, parachutes, and radar altimeters as the Entry Descent and Landing System Test Lead. She has also contributed to Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), Artemis, Hayabusa, Genesis, and the field of small body sample return systems. She joined the Dawn team in 2009 as the Vesta Development Manager.


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