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Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771

ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM

Monday, April 15, 2019 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium

Jim Garvin

"VENUS:  Our Forgotten Sister and Former Ocean World?"

ABSTRACT -- The exploration of Venus is woefully incomplete; myriads of key questions remain unanswered. The challenges of operating on the surface of Venus are considerable. At the surface, the atmospheric pressure is over 90 bars (approximately 90 atmospheres), mainly carbon dioxide, at a temperature of 460 C.

NASA explored Venus in the 1970's (with the Pioneer probes and orbiter) and in the 1990's (with the Magellan radar mapper.) Recent developments have sparked interest in new missions to the planet. Orbital studies by the ESA Venus Express and JAXA's Akatsuki have provided fresh data. Other research suggests that Venus may have had large bodies of water as recently as 1 billion years ago. In addition, new results from astrophysics tied to how solar systems evolve suggests that Venus-like planets may be commonplace around nearby stars and potentially detectable in the upcoming era of JWST and beyond. Venus may be the key to understanding how ocean-bearing planets evolve into states that are not habitable and whether signatures of their habitable past could be discovered via robotic missions. Future Venus exploration will show us a remarkable planetary climate system with dynamic geology and interior processes that will shape how we re-examine our own planet.  Venus awaits us as we strive to understand our place in the Universe.

SPEAKER -- Dr. James B. Garvin was born in a blizzard in Poughkeepsie, New York, and educated at Brown and Stanford Universities.  He received his Ph.D. in Geological Sciences from Brown University in 1984 where his dissertation emphasized the geologic exploration of the surfaces of Mars and Venus.  For the past ~34 years he has served NASA as a scientist in various capacities. He is presently the Chief Scientist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and is a member of the MSL/Curiosity Mars rover and Mars InSight Lander Science Teams.  At NASA Headquarters, he is assisting the Mars Program Director as a special advisor on Mars science. In his overall present capacity, he is helping to plan NASA's continuing Mars exploration program, to catalyze new missions to Mars, Venus, and Earth, to orchestrate innovative scientific research, and to help integrate human and robotic exploration.   He served as chief scientist for the Shuttle Laser Altimeter (SLA) experiment, which flew twice on the Space Shuttle. He has been a science Co-Investigator on the Mars Global Surveyor, Canada's Radarsat-1 (and Radarsat-2), the NEAR-Shoemaker Mission, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, and the Mars Science Laboratory. He is leading NASA's investigation of a newly formed island in the Kingdom of Tonga, which he hopes to visit soon. 

Jim has received multiple NASA Outstanding Leadership awards for his work with Mars, and two Presidential Rank Awards for his scientific contributions to NASA goals.   He has chaired the NASA Administrator's Decadal Planning Team for Exploration and was a member on Sally Ride's post-Challenger leadership team. He was NASA Chief Scientist during President Bush's Vision for Space Exploration initiative.  His cameo role in the recent film World War Z was unexpected. He enjoyed appearing on Late Night with David Letterman in January 2004!

He lives in Columbia Maryland with his wife Cindy and two children, plus a fuzzy mixed-breed rescue dog named Glenda.  Jim enjoys visiting Iceland and exploring landscapes on Earth that are reminiscent of those on Mars and Venus. Today he is still looking for "Mars on Earth", using airborne studies of Earth to help interpret data from probes of other planets. Finally, most recently Jim and several engineers at Goddard have been investigating Apollo lunar samples at new scales with x-ray computed tomography to understand micro-meteorite cratering on the Moon.

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