Lisa Mazzuca Search and Rescue Goddard

Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771

ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM

Monday, March 25, 2019 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium

Lisa Mazzuca

"NASA Search and Rescue: Get Lost…We will find you!"

ABSTRACT -- NASA's Search and Rescue (SAR) Office develops revolutionary technologies that enable accurate location tracking for persons in distress through the international Search and Rescue Satellite Aided Tracking (SARSAT) network. NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) has been involved in providing technical expertise for 40 years, and is a lead agency in the effort, both nationally and internationally, to upgrade the system. The decade-long effort has produced a prototype space payload onboard GPS, a ground station at GSFC able to receive and compute locations from low-Earth, geosynchronous-Earth and now medium-Earth orbits, and an emergency beacon that has an order of magnitude improvement in location accuracy than those currently on the market. The team has crash-tested beacons on planes to improve survivability and installation practices, and worked with the NASA crew survival office to provide the astronauts with the new individual emergency beacons for the first time ever. This talk will summarize the team's work and reveal how NASA technology is saving lives around the world.

SPEAKER -- Dr. Lisa Mazzuca is the NASA Search and Rescue (SAR) Mission Manager. In that capacity she represents NASA both nationally and internationally to set policy and standards for the SAR community, as well as supply technological innovation for satellite-aided emergency transmitters. She began her career at NASA in 1991 as a Flight Dynamics software engineer, where she developed and coded mathematical specifications related to spacecraft orbit trajectories. She received a master's degree in Astrophysics from John's Hopkins University in 1997 and soon after joined the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Project to become the HST Operations Instruments Manager. In 2005 Dr. Mazzuca accepted the position of HST Operations Integration and Test Manager for the final Servicing Mission, guiding the operations ground test program for the new and repaired instruments as well as the communications to HST via the Space Shuttle. In 2006, she received a doctorate in Astronomy from the University of Maryland. Outside of NASA, Lisa is a Major in the Baltimore County Police Auxiliary Unit and has been a member of the Aviation and Marine units since 1994. Part of her mission in both units includes Search and Rescue

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