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

UPCOMING LUNCHEONS: We meet at 11:15 AM on the 2^nd Tuesday of each month at the American Legion Post #136 at 6900 Greenbelt Road. Reservations are required; please contact graalunch@gmail.com (preferred) or call 410-709-8889 before Thursday, October 6th. Note: email reservations are preferred, but if you call, the phone number has changed from the one listed in prior newsletters.

Oct 11	John Mather, Senior Astrophysicist, Goddard Fellow, Nobel Prize recipient, and James Webb Space Telescope Senior Project Scientist, will speak about “Opening the Infrared Treasure Chest with JWST”.
Nov 8	Dave Pierce, Wallops Flight Facility, will bring us up to date in his talk: “Wallops Flight Facility: A Unique NASA and National Asset”.

COMMENTS FROM TONY COMBERIATE AND ARLIN KRUEGER

C. Alex Young, Associate Director for Science in Goddard’s Heliophysics Science Division, spoke at our September luncheon with the topic “The Sun’s Corona: Exciting things to come; Parker, Eclipses and Solar Maximum”. The Sun is a dynamic star that has impacts on numerous facets of our society. It provides the energy for life and is a unique laboratory for better understanding our universe. It is not always benevolent though because it throws increasingly troublesome fits over its 11-year activity cycle that affect our technological infrastructure. People have been studying sunspots and the corona, which is visible from the ground only during total solar eclipses, for years. Alex recalled the public interest leading up to the 2017 solar eclipse, the first one to cross the U.S. in 100 years. He is leading NASA’s public engagement efforts over the next few years which will be an exciting time for scientists and the public. An annular eclipse (when the Sun is not completely blocked by the Moon) will occur on October 14, 2023, and another total eclipse will cross North America on April 8, 2024 with twice as wide a path and a longer totality (4.5 minutes) than the 2017 eclipse.

SOHO, a joint NASA – ESA mission, was launched in 1995 to study the Sun’ s dynamic surface from above our atmosphere. SOHO images show solar atmospheric temperature variations from 5000 K to as many as several million K. Magnetic loops are seen coming out through sunspots, producing solar winds. The heliosphere, a bubble of the Sun’s magnetic field, encompasses our solar system and interacts with interstellar space. Solar flares, Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs), and solar particle events drive the environment in the solar system. Alex showed STEREO spacecraft images of the solar wind, which causes the northern and southern lights. The Earth’s magnetic field interacts with the solar wind, creating upper atmosphere currents, and directing CME and solar wind particles into the poles producing the aurorae. The currents have induced destructive surges in power and telecommunications networks. The particles affect the ionosphere which is critical for communication, causing radio blackouts. They can also damage spacecraft electronics and are hazardous to astronauts outside of low Earth orbit.

Solar flares produce short intense releases of electromagnetic (EM) radiation throughout the entire spectrum, brightest at extreme ultraviolet wavelengths. Solar winds can travel several million km/hr. CMEs and flares can create shock waves that accelerate particles. The largest scale solar flare ever seen was the Halloween 2003 event observed by the SOHO spacecraft, where huge sunspots, the size of Jupiter, caused more flares, CMEs, and particles to be ejected.

The solar cycle, where the Sun goes from low to high sunspot activity, has a period of about 11 years. The last solar cycle was the smallest in 100 years. The current solar cycle was predicted to be similar but is now on the way to a much bigger solar maximum. Cosmic rays from outside of the Solar System are deflected by the solar wind, so when the sun is more active, we see fewer cosmic rays.

The Parker Solar Probe, launched in 2015, will come as close as 3.9 million miles to the sun, within its corona, in December 2024. ESA’s 2020 Solar Orbiter mission images the sun from outside the solar system's plane to view both the Sun’s poles, which are critical for our understanding of the physics of the corona.

SPECIAL NOTE

GRAA depends on donations to commercially print and mail Newsletters and the Directory. Please send your donations to GRAA, P. O. Box 1184, Greenbelt, MD 20768-1184. To minimize mailing costs please send your email address to goddardretirees@gmail.com for electronic copies. Past Newsletters and videos of recent luncheon talks are available at our website http://goddardretirees.org.

TREASURER’S REPORT

Jackie Gasch received tax-deductible donations from Carroll Dudley, Joe Bredekemp, Pedro Sarmiento, Richard Tagler, William Schoene, Ronald Britner, John Tominovich, Jack Triolo, Dick Costa, John Degnan in memory of Tom McGonnigal, and Jacqueline Franks in memory of Henry Franks.

FROM THE GODDARD ARCHIVES — IT HAPPENED IN OCTOBER

Sixty years ago on October 27, 1962, Thor-Delta launched Explorer 15 to study the effects of a high-altitude Starfish nuclear blast on the Earth’s radiation belts. The spacecraft included a retrofit of the Explorer 14 backup science payload.

REMEMBERING OUR FORMER COLLEAGUES

Arthur W. Alberg, 82, of Columbia, MD died on May 10, 2008 from surgical complications. In 1958 Phil Miller hired him away from the signals division of the B&O railroad as one of the first electrical engineers to construct the new GSFC site. During his 30 year career at Goddard he wrote the program to verify that site building wiring and lighting designs conformed to GSFC standards.

Robert Joseph Goss, 94, of Silver Spring MD, died on June 15, 2019. He was the head of the Delta Project Mission Analysis & Integration Office in the 1970s where he was involved in improvements to the Delta launch vehicle and supported both NASA and European Space Agency (ESA) missions, including Atmosphere Explorer missions, Anik A2 (Telesat 2), Interplanetary Monitoring Platform (IMP) missions, ESA's HEOS 2, and other spacecraft launched with the Delta launch vehicle.

Carey Lively, 83, died on October 22, 2019. He received a bachelor’s of engineering degree from the University of Texas in 1960 and a master’s of engineering degree from the University of Colorado in 1963 and worked at Martin Marietta in Colorado before joining NASA in 1964. His 33 years of service at NASA began in the early days of manned spaceflight where he developed avionics for Gemini, Apollo and Skylab programs. He worked on both the Space Shuttle program and the International Space Station. During the latter part of his career, he served as a Mission Systems Engineer for Goddard’s Earth Science missions where he worked on the GRACE, SORCE, and Glory satellite projects.

Fred Healey, 96, passed away at his home in Bethesda, MD on October 25, 2019. After military service during WWII, he studied physics at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, graduating in 1949. He subsequently worked as an electrical engineer in numerous US states and overseas countries including Germany, Turkey, South Africa and Bermuda, where he was Deputy Station Director and then Station Director during the Apollo era, before retiring from Goddard.

Francis Schultz, 83, of Pasadena, MD died on March 17, 2020 at his home. He worked as a pipe fitter for the U.S. Coast Guard before working as an inspector at GSFC until his retirement in 1988. In his retirement, he enjoyed playing guitar and singing with various bands at senior centers, social clubs, and with Carol's Western Wear house band.

Henry J. Franks, Jr., 90, died on September 13, 2020 in Indian Harbour Beach, Florida. Henry was born on January 2, 1930. He worked as an electrical engineer for Naval Research Lab on Project Vanguard, which was the second satellite successfully placed in Earth’s orbit by the US, and the first solar-powered satellite. In October 1958, Henry, along with the rest of the Vanguard team, was transferred to the new National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Henry spent 29 years at NASA working primarily in the development of satellite tracking systems before retiring in 1987.

Eugene Lefferts, 96, of West Milford, NJ died on February 14, 2022 from complications related to a fall. He enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1943 serving as a weather observer in China and the Philippines. He received a B.S. in Education from Westchester State College in 1951 and an M.A. in Mathematics from Temple University in 1953. From 1953 until 1967 he worked at the Glenn L. Martin Company, later called Martin-Marietta Corporation, and then joined GSFC, where he headed the Attitude Dynamics Section of the Mission and Data Operations Center starting in 1972. He was responsible for attitude mission analysis for numerous NASA missions.

Nils Peter Odegard, 65, passed away from the effects of lung fibrosis on August 23, 2022. He was a Goddard astrophysicist making significant contributions to multiple NASA programs, including COBE (quantifying the contributions from the ionized and molecular phases of the interstellar medium), WMAP (generating maps that have served as a "cosmic Rosetta Stone"), and the Roman Space Telescope, developing the detector calibration for the cosmology survey.

Richard D. Ceresa Jr. 87, of College Park, MD, passed away September 3, 2022, after losing his battle with cancer. He worked at Goddard in the Sounding Rocket Division test firing rockets at numerous sites including Wallops Island, Virginia and White Sands, New Mexico. He was transferred in the late 70s to the Payload Support Division supporting the Space Shuttle program. He retired from NASA after 30 years as Division Director. He always said that working at NASA never felt like work because he loved it so much.

Harry Wajsgras, 91, died on September 22, 2022 just one day from his 92nd birthday. Born in Berlin, Germany in 1930, his family fled Germany for England just days before the start of WWII. After the war, he and his family emigrated to New York in 1947 where he earned a degree in physics from City University of New York. He served in the U.S. Air Force during the Korean War. He worked as an electronics technician for the Burroughs Corporation and subsequently for Republic Aviation and Grumman Aerospace where he worked on the Orbiting Astronomical Observatory before joining Goddard where he worked for four decades as a lead power systems engineer for the Orbiting Astronomical Observatory, the Solar Maximum Mission, and the Hubble Space Telescope as a NASA employee.

Philip Yaffee, 104, of Silver Spring, MD, passed away on September 25, 2022. He was born December 28, 1917, in Chelsea, MA. Phil worked for the Navy during World War II before joining Goddard when it opened. His career spanned service as a patent-holding developer of naval warfare systems and a manager of programs to evaluate and improve NASA's scientific and application satellites, until retiring in 1980.