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Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771

ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM

Monday, February 11, 2019 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium

photo of Don Jennings

Don Jennings

"New Horizons and Goddard's LEISA instrument visit Ultima Thule"

ABSTRACT -- On January 1, 2019, the New Horizons spacecraft encountered Ultima Thule, the most distant solar system object ever explored up close. This follows New Horizons' successful flyby of Pluto and its moons in 2015. Aboard New Horizons is an infrared spectrometer, Goddard's own Linear Etalon Imaging Spectral Array (LEISA). Early results from New Horizons and LEISA reveal Ultima Thule to be a unique, complex world.

SPEAKER -- Donald Jennings is a Co-Investigator for the New Horizons mission and Principal Investigator for the spacecraft’s Linear Etalon Imaging Spectral Array (LEISA). He earned a BS in physics from Northern Arizona University in 1970, a PhD in physics from University of Tennessee in 1974, and has been at Goddard since 1976. His main area of research is planetary infrared astronomy, and he has developed instruments to observe infrared spectra of the Sun, planets, Earth, and stars. He has also served as Co-Investigator and Instrument Scientist for Cassini’s Composite Infrared Spectrometer (CIRS) and has worked on other missions including Voyager, STS-39, STS-62, EO-1, OSIRIS-REx, Herschel, and the Robotic Refueling Mission 3.

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