October 14, 2025 GRAA Luncheon
American Legion Post #136
6900 Greenbelt Road
Greenbelt, MD 20771
The speaker for the October 14, 2025 Goddard Retirees & Alumni Association (GRAA) luncheon was Dr. Richard Kelley the U.S. Principal Investigator at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center for the X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM), who provided a presentation on “How the Goddard Space Flight Center built the coldest spectrometer ever to observe the hottest objects in the Universe”
Richard Kelley received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Rutgers University in 1977 and Ph.D. in physics from M.I.T. in 1982. He began working in X-ray astronomy while a graduate student using the SAS-3 satellite. He has been involved with many X-ray observatories since coming to Goddard in 1983, first as a National Research Council Research Associate and then as a NASA employee in 1986. A year after arriving at Goddard, he began working on the development of X-ray microcalorimeters. He has contributed to the steady improvement in energy resolution from 140 eV initially to ~ 1eV and the development of these devices into state-of-the-art flight arrays. This sensor technology has been used most recently on the X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM). He is the US principal investigator for NASA contributions to the XRISM project, received NASA medals for Outstanding Leadership and Exceptional Scientific Achievement, served as a member of the National Research Council Astro 2010 Decadal Survey Study Group on international partnerships, and is a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He received Goddard’s John C. Lindsay Memorial Award in 2016.