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 (240) 720-7833 before Thursday, September 8^th.

Sep 13	C. Alex Young, Associate Director for Science in Goddard’s Heliophysics Science Division, will present “The Sun’s Corona: Exciting things to come; Parker, Eclipses and Solar Maximum”
Oct 11	John Mather, Senior Astrophysicist, Goddard Fellow, Nobel Prize recipient, and James Webb Space Telescope Senior Project Scientist, will discuss Webb’s challenges and early findings.

SPECIAL NOTE: GRAA depends on donations to produce the Newsletters and the Directory. Please send your donations to: GRAA, P. O. Box 1184, Greenbelt, MD 20768-1184. We request that members send their email addresses to goddardretirees@gmail.com to assure receiving future Newsletters. Past Newsletters are also available at our website http://goddardretirees.org.

COMMENTS FROM TONY COMBERIATE AND ARLIN KRUEGER

Our August luncheon speaker was Jody Davis, a Goddard Aerospace Engineer and the Deputy Payload Systems Engineer for the Roman Space Telescope. Her talk, entitled “Roman Space Telescope – Personal Experiences and Engineering Challenges” focused on the challenges and lessons learned during the integration of two flagship Goddard missions: The James Webb Space Telescope, where she did both Systems Engineering and Integration & Test work, and Webb’s successor, the Roman Space Telescope. Jody shared her experiences installing the Webb harness radiator, an essential component to keep the detector temperatures near zero Kelvin. Through a lot of communication and teamwork, they successfully integrated and tested all of the thermal, optical, and mechanical interfaces. Recalling the complexity of the Webb interfaces and tight schedules along the way, she and the entire team said that the fantastic first pictures from Webb made it all worthwhile.

Jody is now the lead interface systems engineer on the Roman Observatory. Roman is designed to complement Webb in settling essential questions of dark energy, exoplanets, and infrared astrophysics. Roman is a survey mission, which will provide full sky coverage in one year, utilizing state-of-the-art detectors. Jody showed a video explaining the Roman mission, a Class A spacecraft that will be launched in FY27 into an L2 orbit with a 5-year mission life and a 10-year goal. It stands 12 meters high, weighs more than 10,000 kg, and will utilize 4500 watts. The spacecraft is being built by Goddard; the 2.4m telescope is being built by L3Harris in Rochester, NY; the primary Wide Field Instrument is being jointly provided by Ball and Goddard, and the Coronagraph is being provided by JPL. The challenge of developing, implementing, and managing complex interfaces is intensified by all the different providers and the overall complexity of the mission. Many members of the Roman team also worked on Webb; their lessons learned will be key to Roman’s success. Jody’s summary of lessons learned includes three key elements: Good leadership enables progress – leadership is as important as technical work; consistent communication is key; face-to-face time is important; and you can’t do it without teamwork!

Jody noted that when she started her NASA career, there were very few women in her field. The Roman Observatory is named after Nancy Grace Roman, a chief NASA astrophysicist, who first convinced Congress to fund Hubble. Today, about one-half of the team are women, and she credits a lot of that progress to Nancy Grace Roman. One of our retirees, Michael McDonald, revealed that he shared an office with Nancy Grace Roman for 15 years and that she would be very proud of the accomplishments of Jody and her colleagues.

TREASURER’S REPORT:

Jackie Gasch received tax-deductible donations from Danny Dalton, Sharon Rubin in memory of Stan Rubin, Susan Sparacino in memory of Gloria Goodman, Ralph Ryder in memory of Alberta Moran, Dr. Hong-Yee Chiu and Arlin Krueger.

FROM THE GODDARD ARCHIVES — IT HAPPENED IN SEPTEMBER:

Atlas rocket launches on September 17, 1986 and September 24, 1987 placed NOAA-10 and NOAA-11 into polar orbits as operational weather satellites. NOAA-10 included the Earth Radiation Budget Experiment (ERBE).

REMEMBERING OUR FORMER COLLEAGUES:

Ursula Margaret Weaver, 82, of Topsham, passed away on Thursday, June 16, 2022. Born in Washington, D.C, on December 28, 1939, she worked for the Dept of the Navy before joining Goddard.

Shirley A. Gildersleeve, of Bowie, MD, passed away on July 2, 2021. As a military wife she spent time in numerous states and countries including England, Spain and Okinawa with her husband and young family. She worked at GSFC as a branch secretary for 13 scientists and retired in 1995.

Edward H. Johnson, Jr., 85, passed away on July 9, 2022, in Fort Myers, FL. Ed was born October 11, 1936, in Philadelphia, PA. He served in the U.S. Army from 1955 to 1958, then graduated in electrical engineering from Drexel University. He worked at Goddard on the UARS Project and retired in 1992.

Jon H. Stripling, 85 of Wildwood, FL passed away on July 20, 2022, He was born in Newbern, TN. After working as an air traffic controller in the US Air Force, he began work for NASA, Wallops Island, VA in 1963 as a mathematician and later as a systems analyst and was in charge of computer and control centers.

Henry W. Stintz, passed away on July 21, 2022. He joined Goddard in the mid- '60s and became the Station Director for NASA's Manned Space Flight Network on Ascension Island - providing critical communication with NASA's Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions.

Norman John Piterski, 82, of Odenton, Maryland, passed away on August 6, 2022. He worked as an Electrical Engineer for Goddard Space Flight Center for 30 years and was a Project Operations Director and Mission Operations Manager for satellite missions.

Michael P. “Mike” Finneran, 67, passed away on August 8, 2022. Born on October 24, 1954, Mike worked in public affairs at both Goddard and Langley, where he retired in 2018.

John Henry Dammeyer, of Annapolis, Maryland, 92, passed away on August 10, 2022. After serving in the US Army, he began a 30-year career in US Government Procurement with multiple federal agencies; NSA, NASA, EPA, and the Department of Commerce.

Christopher “Chris” Darrin Beidel of Dallas, Texas passed away on August 14, 2022, at the age of 54. Following graduation from New Mexico State University, he joined NASA Kennedy Space Center, then transferred to Goddard and NASA Headquarters.

Mary Halverstadt, 88, passed away on Aug 16, 2022. She worked on the Apollo and Space Shuttle Program and in the Goddard Resident office at KSC.

Joyce Ann McCall, 89, of New Carrollton, MD, passed away on August 21, 2022. Born in 1932 in Flint, Michigan, she retired from Goddard.