April 14, 2026 GRAA Luncheon
American Legion Post #136
6900 Greenbelt Road
Greenbelt, MD 20771
The April 14, 2026 speaker will be Dr. Anti A. Pulkkinen, Director of the NASA Office of JPL Management and Oversight (NOJMO)who will present “Space Weather: The New ‘Weather’ of a Technological Society”
Modern society runs on invisible threads: satellites, GPS timing, wireless communication, and electric power. Space weather is the “weather” that can tug on all of them—and it also paints the sky with breathtaking auroras when solar activity is high. Powered by the Sun, space weather includes eruptions and variations in solar output that change the radiation and magnetic environment around Earth and throughout the solar system. When strong events arrive, they can disturb satellite electronics, degrade GPS accuracy, interrupt radio communications, raise radiation exposure for astronauts and high-altitude flights, and—during extreme storms—stress power grids and other critical infrastructure to the point of collapse.
This talk will explain space weather in everyday terms, show how solar activity travels from the Sun to Earth, and describe how we measure conditions in space in real time. I will then discuss what NASA is doing—through missions, models, and partnerships — to advance space weather forecasting and to support safer, more reliable technology on Earth and safer human exploration beyond it.
Biography
Antti A. Pulkkinen, Ph.D., is Director of the NASA Office of JPL Management and Oversight (NOJMO). NOJMO is the NASA Headquarters on-site government organization at JPL, responsible for contract management, agency oversight, and ensuring contractor compliance with federal regulations.
He previously served as Director of the Heliophysics Science Division (Code 670) at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, leading a 450-person science and technology organization. In that role, he managed the world’s largest concentration of heliophysicists, supporting flight missions and research programs while building partnerships with industry, academia, and U.S. government agencies including NOAA, DoD, and the intelligence community. Before becoming Division Director, he served as Acting Director and Deputy Director of Code 670, where he advanced hiring strategies, promoted AI/ML-enabled science, coordinated decadal survey preparations, and guided the Science-Enabling Technologies for Heliophysics (SETH) mission concept through Phase A and Step-2 proposal development.
Pulkkinen also directed NASA Goddard’s Space Weather Research Center, which supports robotic and human exploration with space weather forecasting and anomaly analysis. He previously held faculty and leadership positions at The Catholic University of America, where he launched a graduate program in space weather. Earlier in his career, he was a NASA Postdoctoral Fellow, a researcher with UMBC’s Goddard Earth Sciences and Technology Center, and a scientist at the Finnish Meteorological Institute, where he produced seminal work on geomagnetically induced currents and end-to-end geospacemodeling.
Pulkkinen is a member of the Finnish Academy of Sciences, holds a U.S. patent on the use of power grids for geophysical imaging, and has received honors including the International Kristian Birkeland Medal and NASA’s Exceptional Achievement Medal. He earned his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the University of Helsinki.