Home
QR Code

Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771

ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM

Monday, March 27, 2017 / 3:30 PM, Building 8 Auditorium

Alan Kogut

"NASA's Scientific Balloon Program: an Overview"

ABSTRACT -- Scientific ballooning has seen tremendous progress since the first balloon flights in 1783 carried simple meteorological instruments to an altitude of a few thousand feet. Now behemoths the size of football stadiums carry sophisticated observatories to the edge of space at altitudes over 130,000 feet. I will describe NASA's scientific ballooning program and highlight what can be done with a few acres of plastic film and a few million cubic feet of helium gas.

SPEAKER -- Alan Kogut is a member of the Laboratory for Cosmology within the Exploration of the Universe Directorate at Goddard. After completing his undergraduate education at Princeton, and obtaining a Ph.D. at the University of California at Berkeley, he came to Goddard to work on the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE).

Since then he has worked on both balloon flights and spacecraft. He was Principal Investigator for the balloon missions Absolute Radiometer for Cosmology, Astrophysics, and Diffuse Emission (ARCADE) and Primordial Anisotropy Polarization Pathfinder Array (PAPPA). He served as a science team member for the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP).

His other work includes development of Micro Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) technologies, high-emissivity coatings for passive cooling, and microwave instrumentation.



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