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Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771

ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM

Monday, January 30, 2017 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium

Keith Gendreau

"The NICER Mission"

ABSTRACT -- The Neutron Star Interior Composition ExploreR (NICER) is an X-ray astrophysics mission of opportunity (MoO) that will reveal the inner workings of neutron stars, cosmic lighthouses that embody unique gravitational, electromagnetic, and nuclear-physics environments. NICER achieves this objective by deploying a high-heritage instrument as an attached payload on a zenith-side ExPRESS Logistics Carrier (ELC) aboard the International Space Station (ISS). NICER offers order-of-magnitude improvements in time-coherent sensitivity and timing resolution beyond the capabilities of any X-ray observatory flown to date.

I will overview the NICER mission and discuss our experience working with the ISS.

SPEAKER -- Keith Gendreau is an astrophysicist in the Astrophysics Science Division at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. He received his PhD from MIT in 1995 calibrating and modeling radiation damage mechanisms of CCDs for the ASCA X-ray astrophysics mission. He also studied the Cosmic X-ray background for his thesis. Since then he has been the study scientist for the MAXIM black hole imager mission concept and has demonstrated X-ray interferometry in the laboratory. He also works on applications of X-ray astrophysics developed technology for such fields as spacecraft navigation, material analysis, and communication. He is currently the principal investigator of the NICER mission.

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