June 9, 2026 GRAA Luncheon
American Legion Post #136
6900 Greenbelt Road
Greenbelt, MD 20771
Cost: $12
The June 9, 2026 speaker will be Dr. Dong Wu, the NASA Goddard Deputy Principal Investigator (PI) for the Polarized Submillimeter Ice-cloud Radiometer (PolSIR) Mission who will present “PolSIR: NASA’s Submillimeter Polarimetric Mission for Diurnal Ice Cloud Science”
Dr. Dong Wu is the Project Scientist of NASA’s Total and Spectral Solar Irradiance Sensor (TSIS) mission at Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC). His research interests have been focused on remote sensing of the atmosphere (clouds, winds, temperature) and the ionosphere (electron density and scintillation) using microwave, submm-wave, infrared and visible techniques. Currently, he is the Deputy PI of Polarized Submillimeter Ice-cloud Radiometer (PolSIR), an Earth Venture Instrument (EVI-6) mission to study cloud diurnal variation from two 16U CubeSats with a scheduled launch in 2027. Between 2014-2018, he led Goddard’s IceCube project, a flight technology demonstration of 883-GHz radiometer that acquired 15-months’ worth of cloud ice measurements from a 3U CubeSat which was a precursor to the PolSIR mission. Wu is also supporting NASA’s Commercial Satellite Data Acquisition (CSDA) program as a subject matter expert (SME) for Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) radio occultation (RO). Prior to Goddard, Dr. Wu was a Principal Research Scientist and the supervisor of the Aerosol and Cloud Group at Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) during 1994-2011. Dr. Wu received his Ph.D. in atmospheric science in 1994 from the University of Michigan. He has authored and co-authored more than 200 papers on peer-reviewed journals and received several awards, including NASA Exceptional Achievement Medal (2001, 2008 and 2022), JPL Ed Stone award for Outstanding Research Paper in 2006, and Robert H. Goddard Award for Science (2019 and 2025).