GRAA NEWSLETTER
P.O. Box 1184, Greenbelt, MD 20768-1184

IMPORTANT DATES

June 14

Dr. James Garvin, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Chief Scientist, will talk about Goddard’s exciting new planetary mission: “Sounding the Venus Atmosphere with DAVINCI” the Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging mission.

July 12

Lori Perkins of Goddard’s Science Visualization Studio will give an encore performance of her talk, “Visualizing NASA’s Science Results and Why it Matters”. We were unable to show the spectacular videos produced by SVS due to equipment problems in Lori’s talk last year, so we have invited her back. These big-screen dramatic videos make many of our hard-won scientific findings available to scientists and the public around the world.

COMMENTS FROM TONY COMBERIATE AND ARLIN KRUEGER:

Our May luncheon speaker was Dr. Michelle Thaller, Astrophysicist, and Assistant Director of Science for Communications at Goddard. Her talk entitled “The James Webb Space Telescope: New Eyes on the Universe,” described the capability and expectations of NASA’s latest great observatory, first selected for development in 1995 and launched on Christmas Day, December 25th, 2021. She explained that Webb operates at infrared (IR) wavelengths that can’t be seen from the ground. In addition, visible-light astronomy now takes advantage of new ground-based telescope technology that corrects atmospheric distortion and has effective apertures the size of the Earth. Webb is designed to look at stars and galaxies in the early universe. We have to look in the IR to see them because stellar wavelengths are red-shifted when they reach the Earth some 14 billion years later. The first stars collapsed as the original hydrogen burned out during fusion, leading to dust-forming explosions. This dust clouds the view in visible wavelengths, but IR light penetrates the dust to reveal the stars in galaxies. In earlier IR missions even our closest galaxy, Andromeda, appears fuzzy due to small telescope apertures. This will be resolved by the 7.5m diameter Webb mirror.

Unlike Hubble, Webb does not have a protective shroud around the mirrors. However, its detectors operate near absolute zero and depend on a sun shield to protect from solar heating. The shield operates at a hot sun-side temperature of 185 degrees F and a cold space-side (detector) temperature of -388 degrees F.

Michelle showed impressive videos of Webb’s development and test program both at Goddard and Northrop Grumman before it was shipped (by boat) 5,800 miles from California to its launch site in French Guiana. Webb is an engineering marvel! The mirror assembly and the sun shield are folded to fit the nose fairing of the rocket. The shield itself contains 140 release mechanisms, 70 hinge assemblies, 8 deployment motors, 400 pulleys, and 1,312 feet of cable along with supporting bearings, springs, and gears. A single-point failure nightmare!

Webb had a picture-perfect launch on an Ariane 5 rocket that saved Webb’s fuel to extend its life. The solar array deployment was seen in a video from the booster. Then in the month-long trip to orbit at the second Lagrange point, L2, a flawless deployment of its sun shield and mirror took place. Unfolding the five-layer, tennis court-sized heat shield was the riskiest element. Following that the mirror wings were unfolded and each of the 18 mirror segments was individually aligned to a common focal point. The first photo showed 18 separate images of a star from the mirror segments before they were aligned. In an extensive commissioning process, even the curvature of each segment was adjusted for optimum phasing. Meanwhile, the instruments are being calibrated while the detectors cool to near-zero K operating temperatures.

Areas of Webb science utilizing its four instruments and a coronagraph include giant black holes (a billion times the mass of our sun); the life cycle of stars; planetary systems, and exoplanets. The images, available later this year, will likely be as revolutionary as from its predecessor Hubble three decades ago. Follow the mission at the jwst.nasa.gov website.

REMEMBERING OUR FORMER COLLEAGUES:

Penshu Yeh, 70, of Rockville, MD, died on January 21, 2022. She received a Master of Science in electrical engineering from the University of Washington and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford University and worked in both academia and industry researching computer/robotic vision, pattern recognition, and data compression prior to joining NASA in 1988. In the 1990s, she assisted the development of the first Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS) lossless data compression standard. She was a co-investigator on the data compression experiment for the Small Satellite Technology Initiative (SSTI) Lewis spacecraft in 1997 and worked with engineers at the University of Idaho's Center for Advanced Microelectronics Biomolecular Research (CAMBR) on the development of special data compression processors for the Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM) and for the Goddard-developed Fast Plasma Investigation (FPI) instrument for the Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission (MMS). She also developed data compression methods that improved the processing of data for other missions, including the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), and was a co-author on numerous published articles and papers.

Dorothy Karen Moy, 72, of Clifton, VA died on April 15, 2022. She was a graduate of the University of Maryland and High Point High School in Beltsville, Maryland. She developed a passion for the space program early in her life and during her career at Goddard she worked on unmanned programs. She also sewed professionally from the day she married—this year would have been her 45th wedding anniversary—and used her business acumen to start a business, "Karen's - A Personal Touch," continuing to sew throughout the rest of her life.

Epaminondas G. Stassinopoulos, also known as “Stass,” died at the age of 101 on May 16, 2022. He was born in Bonn Germany and grew up in Berlin where he was a student at Berlin's Academische Gymnasium in 1935 when members of the Hitler-Jugend (Hitler Youth) assaulted him and his brother leaving both seriously injured. The family then fled to Greece to escape Nazism. He studied law in Athens and, when Axis Powers occupied Greece in 1941, he served as a member of the Greek resistance movement. He also served in the 1st Infantry Division during the Greek Civil War from 1946-1949, alongside US advisors under the Marshall Plan one of whom sponsored his emigration to the U.S. in 1954. Inspired by America’s aerospace program, he decided to study physics at American and Catholic Universities in Washington D.C. In 1961, he went to work for NASA at GSFC where he became Head of Goddard SFC's Radiation Physics Office, worked on research in magnetospheric physics, geomagnetism, solar-terrestrial relationships, natural and man-made radiation exposure, radiation effects on biological and electronic systems and components, and radiation environment modeling. He was the principal investigator in multiple original research for NASA and the author or co-author of hundreds of papers and articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals and books in the field of space radiation. He was awarded a patent in 2008 for his miniaturized radiation spectrometer, currently on the NASA Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite, which was launched in 2015. At 95 years of age, he co-authored a NASA Technical Report "Forty-Year 'Drift' and Change of the South Atlantic Anomaly (SAA)", making him one of the oldest publishing research scientists in NASA's history. On May 27, he was interred in Parklawn Memorial Cemetery in Rockville next to his wife of 63 years, Eftichia, who was a philologist and archaeologist.

Robert O. Wales, 100, passed away May 28, 2022 at Buckingham’ s Choice in Adamstown, MD just 6 weeks from his 101st birthday; he was born July 14, 1921 in Washington D.C. and graduated from Woodrow Wilson High School in 1938 and then began undergraduate studies at George Washington University (GWU). His studies were interrupted by World War II when, as a member of the D.C. National Guard Band, he was called to service in the U.S. Army in January 1941 serving for the duration of the war. He completed his degree from GWU in 1947 and days later married Ruth Hale of Blackstone VA. They raised their family in Colesville, MD. For 45 years, Bob was an electronic engineer for the federal government spending 28 of those years at Goddard where he was at the forefront of computer and data technology serving in the Engineering Directorate’s Instrument branch where he supported the ACTS Project in the 1970s and was the Project Operations Director for ATS/ICE/IMP and ISEE 1&2 in the 1980s. Bob moved to Middletown, MD in 1989, where he again began playing his euphonium horn, marching in parades and riding on bandwagons into his 90s with the Harmony, Browningsville, and Rohrsville Cornet Bands and the Yellow Springs Concert Band. Active travelers, Bob and Ruth enjoyed many walking adventures throughout the U.S. and the world. He was also a lifelong Baltimore Orioles baseball fan and enjoyed watching their games, current and past, until his last day.

FROM THE GODDARD ARCHIVES — IT HAPPENED IN JUNE:

Forty years ago, on June 27, 1982 Shuttle Columbia STS-4 carried the first Get Away Special (GAS) experiment.

TREASURER’S REPORT:

Treasurer Jackie Gasch received tax-deductible donations from Ralph Welsh, Karl Peters and Belle Davis in memory of Alberta Moran.