National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Post 1 of 5: Explore the sun on your desktop with Helioviewer
Post 2 of 5: Getting Started with Helioviewer.org
Post 3 of 5: Explore the sun in depth with JHelioviewer]

New interactive visualization tools developed by the NASA/European Space Agency (ESA) Helioviewer Project allow scientists and the general public to explore images captured by solar observing spacecraft. Previous posts explained the origins and aims of the Helioviewer Project, and the basics of a Web-based app called Helioviewer.org. This post takes a closer look at a downloadable software application JHelioviewer.





The Web app Helioviewer.org allows you to dip your toes into the water of solar image visualization. JHelioviewer, a piece of software you install on your computer, is a dive into the deep end. It gives you powerful additional tools to create vivid images and time-lapse videos.

When you install and start JHelioviewer, it displays a time-lapse video of the most recent 24-hour set of images available from the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) at 171 Angstroms. (Read this previous post to learn more about the AIA 171 Angstrom channel on SDO.)

Here are the basic menus along the left of the JHelioviewer desktop. Guidance is also available on the JHelioviewer Wiki Handbook.

Overview
In the Overview menu area (top left), use the yellow frame with the little “Bull’s eye” to target the area of the image you want to work with. If you have a thumb wheel on your mouse, use it to expand or contract the size of the frame. Or use the Zoom in and Zoom out buttons on the top navigation bar.

One of the coolest tools in JHelioviewer is Feature tracking. Center the yellow Bull’s eye on a feature and click the Track icon on the top-navigation bar. When you make a time-lapse video, it will hold the targeted feature steady as the rest of the sun moves around it! The software compensates for the rotation of the sun.

This can be especially dramatic if you zoom in close to a feature, like a tangle of magnetic loops, and switch on Track. The feature stays right in the center of the viewer as you watch the magnetic loops dance.

Movie Controls
With the More Options tab selected, you can adjust the per-second cadence of your video sequence. The higher the rate, the smoother the video.

Also, there are three play modes: play once and stop; loop forward; or play forward and then backward.

Layers
These controls allow you to create sets of solar images to examine, alter, and render into videos. Clicking Add Layer brings up a panel for choosing the start and stop dates, the observatory, the instrument, and the time step between images. The time settings are in UTC (coordinated universal time), which is the same as Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). UTC minus 5 hours gives you Eastern Standard Time.

If you, for example, want to make a video of the past day of solar activity, choose a 24-hour start and stop interval. Now you have to choose the Time Step. Once per hour will make a pretty jumpy video.

So, say you pick the other extreme — once per minute. Unfortunately, you can’t do it, because the system limits you to sets of no more than 1000 images at a time, and there are 1,440 minutes in a day. How about every 10 minutes? Set the Time Step to 2 minutes and you will get 144 images to cover the 24-hour period.

Adjustments
The video you create initially may already look pretty good. But you can use the Adjustments tools to tweak the look of the video and highlight details. Sharpen compensates for fuzziness. Gamma brightens the image. And Contrast increases the differences between bright and dark areas.

Another cool feature: You can make these changes “on the fly,” as your video continues to play. You can also switch AIA instruments on the fly, and frame rate, too, to get the perfect video.

HEK Events
Turning on this feature adds a layer of labels drawn from the Heliophysics Events Knowledgebase. It labels flares, for example, with a special icon. Clicking on an icon makes a window pop up with detailed technical information about the event.

HEK events

Cool stuff in JHelioviewer
You can create multiple layers and adjust the relative contribution of each using the Opacity control. Layers chosen from the same time period will play in synch.

Another cool feature: Notice in the Layers panel how you can watch the minutes, hours, days, etc. progress as the video plays. I made a 1-year video to browse for times of the year when the sun was especially active, then went back to those periods to grab still images.

For example, set the time to October 7, 2010, and make a video of that day. Do you see a big dark circle cross in front of the sun? That was the moon during a lunar transit.

JHelioviewer does not, like the Web app Helioviewer.org, allow you to instantly share your video to YouTube. But you can download it as an mp4 file (File>Export Movie), and post it manually on your blog, YouTube channel, or other sharing sites.

But watch out for the file size! My 1-year video at 12-hour time steps (627 SDO images) came in at a file size of 127 Mb. To generate a smaller output file, make the “frame size” smaller in the Export dialog settings.

Here is the video I made with JHelioviewer of a year in the life of our star, May 2010 to May 2011. You can do it, too.






LEARN MORE

Helioviewer.org (Web app)

A collection of video highlights from 2011 (so far) created by Helioviewer.org users.

See a Helioviewer.org video made by “citizen scientist” LudzikLegoTechnics on YouTube.

The Helioviewer Project Wiki

JHelioviewer (downloadable software)

Read a Web feature about JHelioviewer and its capabilities

The JHelioviewer online handbook

JHelioviewer video tutorial on YouTube HD

ESA Web feature about JHelioviewer.

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OH AND DID I MENTION? All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center. And while we’re at it, links to websites posted on this blog do not imply endorsement of those websites by NASA.

Post 1 of 5: Explore the sun on your desktop with Helioviewer
Post 2 of 5: Getting Started with Helioviewer.org

New interactive visualization tools developed by the NASA/European Space Agency (ESA) Helioviewer Project allow scientists and the general public to explore the growing body of high-definition images of the sun captured by solar observing spacecraft. A previous post explained the origin and aims of the Helioviewer Project. This post takes a closer look at a Web-based tool called Helioviewer.org.





When you first visit Helioviewer.org, you’ll see an orange ball. That’s the most recent image available of the sun, courtesy of NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO).

The Time menu
At the top left of the image window, three drop-down menus allow you to choose the time and date at which you want to observe the sun, including latest, meaning “the most recent available.”

The time is given in UTC: coordinated universal time, also known as GMT, or Greenwich Mean Time. To convert to U.S. Eastern Standard Time, subtract 5 hours from UTC (and so on).

Time-step allows you to browse solar images in steps of 1 second to 1 year.

The Images menu
When you first visit Helioviewer.org, the Images menu setting will default to the most recent SDO image available from the spacecraft’s Atmospheric Imagining Assembly (AIA) instrument at a wavelength of 304 Angstroms.

Think of it as looking at the sun through a filter that blocks out everything except the wavelengths near 304 Angstroms. The AIA has 10 such “channels. This Wikipedia article about SDO includes a helpful table showing the different channels and what temperature of solar material they correspond to.

To be more specific, the 304 Angstrom view from SDO is the energy emitted by positively charged helium atoms (He⁺) at around 60,000-80,000 degrees. In SDO images, it is commonly displayed  in a rich orange color.

Click anywhere on the title bar for AIA 304. This expands your viewing options.

The Opacity slider is a fader control, allowing you to display from zero to 100 percent of the image.

Below that, drop-down menus allow you to choose the image source by observatory/spacecraft, instrument, detector, and measurement type.

So, for example, change the measurement type from AIA 304 to AIA 171. At 171 Angstroms, you see magnetic loop structures protruding from the solar surface.

The AIA 171 captures ultraviolet light from processes on the sun occurring at more than a half-million degrees (compared to AIA 304’s 60,000 degrees).

Mixing multiple images
The real magic of Helioviewer.org starts when you click Add at the top right of the image menu area. This creates a second (or third, or fourth…) image.

You can use these menus to seamlessly overlay and combine multiple images of the same solar image captured in different wavelengths by SOHO and SDO.

To do it, call up multiple images at different wavelengths and then use the Opacity sliders to meld the images together by altering their relative brightnesses.

The really cool thing is that Helioviewer.org (and JHelioviewer) allow you to visualize a process happening on the sun in different ways (by overlaying images from different instruments). Or you can explore the relationship between different processes happening at different times.

Making time-lapse videos
Click Movie at the top right of the image window to create a time-lapse video of the sun’s surface. The default setting will create a video covering 24 hours, centered on the current observation time.

Alternatively, you can click Settings above the image window to make a video with duration of 3 hours to 1 week.

Under normal traffic conditions, it will take a minute or two to generate the video. But as more users call on this service, the wait times increase. In fact, in the days following the June 7 prominence eruption, the demand for video was so great that the Helioviewer Project had to literally erase the queue of requests as they stretched into days.

A pop up window will let you know when the video is ready. You will have the option of either downloading a copy or sharing it to YouTube.

The Recently shared window shows you a video recently uploaded by someone to YouTube,

Other sharing features
The Link and Screenshot features also allow you to share or store images or combinations of images created using Helioviewer.org.

Tomorrow: Explore solar images and video in depth with JHelioviewer.

LEARN MORE

Helioviewer.org (Web app)

A collection of video highlights from 2011 (so far) created by Helioviewer.org users.

See a Helioviewer.org video made by “citizen scientist” LudzikLegoTechnics on YouTube.

The Helioviewer Project Wiki:

JHelioviewer (downloadable software)

Read a Web feature about JHelioviewer and its capabilities

The JHelioviewer online handbook

JHelioviewer video tutorial on YouTube HD

ESA Web feature about JHelioviewer.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________
OH AND DID I MENTION? All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center. And while we’re at it, links to websites posted on this blog do not imply endorsement of those websites by NASA.

The website for NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory here at Goddard has a really cool feature called Pick of the Week. Starting on May 21 last year, shortly after SDO saw first light, the curators of Pick of the Week have chosen an image to feature, whether for its scientific interest of sheer drama or beauty. Here is a slide show of the pick-of-the-week images from SDO’s first year.

Steele Hill, SOHO/STEREO/SDO Media Specialist here at Goddard, chooses the pick-of-the-week images, researches the science, writes the captions, and posts the content online. These images are often displayed at science centers and museums across the country.





AND DON”T FORGET to pick your favorite video for the SDO First Light Anniversary Video Contest. Choose from 10 different videos released over the past year.



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OH AND DID I MENTION? All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center. And while we’re at it, links to websites posted on this blog do not imply endorsement of those websites by NASA.

A visualization of the sodium "exosphere" around Mercury courtesy of Matthew Burger at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.



In the space exploration racket, there is no sweeter word than “first.” And so it was last night that a NASA spacecraft made an important First in planetary exploration:

“NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft successfully achieved orbit around Mercury at approximately 9 p.m. EDT Thursday. This marks the first time a spacecraft has accomplished this engineering and scientific milestone at our solar system’s innermost planet.”


We flung the Mariner 10 spacecraft past Mercury in fly-by missions in 1974-75. And Messenger itself did three fly-bys as it got into position for the final “orbital insertion.” Now it is the first space probe to park in orbit around the first rock from the sun.





Rosemary Killen, a researcher at Goddard, is one of the many scientists who will reap rewards from this so-far spectacularly successful mission. Her target is the thin “exosphere” of sodium, potassium, and calcium knocked off Mercury’s barren rocky surface by the “solar wind” streaming from the sun.

If you want all the scientific details, read a short explanation below by Rosemary Killen about her work And also read about some of the instruments that Goddard scientists and engineers helped to put on the spacecraft.

Otherwise, enjoy the slide show of Messenger images, 2004-2011, and an informative video by Tom Watters (below), a geologist in the Center for Earth and Planetary Studies at the Smithsonian Institution. He explains the goals of Messenger.





Rosemary Killen:

“I am a Participating Scientist on the MESSENGER mission and a member of the MASCS (Mercury Atmospheric and Surface Composition Spectrometer) team. MASCS is a spectrometer covering ultraviolet, visible, and near-infrared wavelengths. The MASCS ultraviolet and visible channel is designed primarily to observe the exosphere, or the very tenuous atmosphere about Mercury, by scanning over selected, diagnostic wavelength ranges.

“Our goals are to determine the composition of the exosphere (which is only partially known at present), and, over the mission lifetime, to determine its spatial and temporal variability. We do this by observing emission lines from atoms (and a few ions) in the exosphere above Mercury’s surface. In so doing we hope to determine the processes that eject atoms from the surface into the exosphere and that lead to the loss of material from the Mercury system.

“Important factors include the relationships among the exosphere and the solar ultraviolet flux, the solar wind and interplanetary magnetic field, and the planet’s intrinsic magnetic field. We hope to be able to determine the effects (if any) of meteor streams that may intersect Mercury’s orbit.

“One intriguing question is the nature of the deposits seen by Earth-based radar (specifically that at the Arecibo Observatory) in polar craters on Mercury, and what that tells us about the sequestration of volatiles. The visible and near-infrared channel of MASCS is primarily designed to measure the reflectance spectrum of the surface in order to determine the mineralogy of surface materials. Ultimately the goal is to unravel the history of the planet: its origin and evolution to the state it occupies today.”

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OH AND DID I MENTION? All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center. And while we’re at it, links to websites posted on this blog do not imply endorsement of those websites by NASA.




A big chunk of the Webb Telescope goes out for a spin: This week a web feature story came out about ongoing testing of the metal cage that will hold the various scientific instrument on the Webb Telescope – the heir to the Hubble Space Telescope now under construction here at Goddard and elsewhere in NASA.

Webb will undergo significant shaking when it is launched on the large Ariane V rocket. To be sure the telescope’s “chassis” is ready for this “bumpy road,” the ISIM is subjected to some extreme testing.  During the testing process, the ISIM is spun and shaken while many measurements are taken. Afterwards, engineers compare the measurements with their models of the ISIM. If there are discrepancies, then the engineers track down why, and make corrections.


That centrifuge is a pretty impressive piece of hardware, let me tell you. Months ago, I got a chance to film a preliminary spin-up test of the giant centrifuge. This thing, at full throttle, can spin about once every two seconds. The test I saw was a lot tamer than that, spinning at roughly 2 rpm. Check it out:




The centrifuge room is pretty noisy, and the equipment is massive — on the order of a half-million pounds. And so it starts out slow. But gradually it picks up speed. At very high speed, it’s way too dangerous to be in the room. (The engineers work in a separate control room during actual tests.) If even a small bit of hardware were to fly off the centrifuge, it could cause a serious injury. My friend Jay Friedlander (the cameraman) and I were very grateful to the engineers for letting us witness an actual spin-up of the centrifuge — an uncommon site at Goddard.

Here comes the sun on the Goddard Flickr channel: The Goddard Flickr channel was all aglow this week with images of the sun, courtesy of NASA’s solar observing fleet. A web feature by one of Goddard’s newest solar scribes, Karen Fox, announced the 400-year anniversary of the first scientific publication about sunspots. Goddard’s Flickr photomistress, Rebecca Roth, obliged with an entire set of spectacular sun imagery. Here is my favorite, a super-high-resolution image of a sunspot by the Hinode spacecraft. Go to the Flickr set to see the rest.


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OH AND DID I MENTION? All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center. And while we’re at it, links to websites posted on this blog do not imply endorsement of those websites by NASA.

An earlier post featured the scary “spacecraft house of horrors” video about the testing torments suffered by our satellites before we send them to orbit. The video was hosted by our own Kevin Boyce, a spacecraft systems engineer. These days, Kevin is part of the international team working on the Japanese Astro-H mission. Here’s an account of his recent trip to Japan to help design an X-ray instrument.

How do you say in Japanese, “If you don’t succeed, try, try again”?

ASTRO-E was to be Japan’s fifth X-ray astronomy mission, but unfortunately the spacecraft was lost during launch on February 10, 2000.

Ok, try again. A follow-on mission, Astro-E2, launched successfully on July 10, 2005 from the Uchinoura Space Center in Japan. Soon after launch, the mission was renamed Suzaku.

The ill-fated Astro-E spacecraft

Kevin Boyce can tell you all about it. Recently, as he was landing at Tokyo’s Narita Airport, it (almost) felt like coming home. “I’ve been here almost 40 times now,” he says. That started in the late 90’s with the ill-fated Astro-E project. Then he worked on the Astro E2/Suzaku mission that followed.

Now he’s an instrument systems engineer on one of the instruments on a new spacecraft called Astro-H. As he disembarks from the plane, he wonders if he should take the usual trains to the hotel, or take the bus this time. He decides on the bus option, and gets some cash from the ATM and buys a Matcha Creme Frappuccino from the Starbucks. Yes, America has left its mark here too.

Artist's concept of Astro-H

Astro-H is Kevin’s third go-round with Japan’s space agency, JAXA, and Japan’s 8th space-based astronomy mission. It will launch into low-Earth orbit intending to trace the growth history of the largest structures in the universe, reveal the behavior of matter in extreme gravitational fields, determine the spin of black holes and study neutron stars, trace shock acceleration structures in clusters of galaxies, and investigate the detailed physics of galactic jets.

Um, is THAT all?

To do all that requires a gadget called a Soft X-ray Spectrometer (SXS), and Kevin is here in Japan to help shepherd the design of the instrument through a complex and high-stakes process that is difficult to carry out effectively solely by email or phone. It take as bunch of long plane rides and as many Matcha Creme Frappuccinos.

He’s in Japan for a week to participate in one of the quarterly Astro-H design meetings. “At these meetings all the various instrument teams report on their status, along with the spacecraft systems team,” he explains. “This generally lasts for two days.”

The rest of the time, the scientists and engineers pick apart the various sub-systems of the SXS. The devil is in the details, as the cliché goes. Miss a detail, and possibly buy lots of (expensive) trouble. Space missions take years and years and millions and millions of dollars.

SXS pushes X-ray observing technology. “Many of the people on both sides of the Pacific who are working on Astro-H, myself included, have been trying to get this technology operating on orbit since 1995,” he explains. “So it’s not just the trains and locations that make it feel like home. Some of my best old friends are here.”

This particular trip included a “hole.” Meeting took up Tuesday and Thursday, but Wednesday was a Japanese holiday, with no meetings scheduled. But you can’t fly home for a day. So what to do?

“Happily, some of our Japanese colleagues scheduled a bike trip into the mountains, and rented me a bike so I could join them,” he says. “We rode 50 kilometers up toward lake Yamanaka, climbing 700 meters in the process. And then back..”

[Read Kevin’s account of the bike trip on the NASA Blueshift blog.]

Snow-capped Mt. Fuji forms the background for a bike ride into the mountains.

After that ride, the design meeting was almost anticlimactic. But very important! The reason the X-Ray Spectrometer failed on Astro-E2 was basically due to incomplete communication between Goddard Space Flight Center and the Japanese during the design of the instrument. “This time we’re meeting much more often, and exchanging far more information, so that doesn’t happen again,” Boyce explains. “It’s not enough to exchange drawings and requirements documents. Each side really has to understand the whole instrument, and indeed the whole spacecraft system.”

So this time, Boyce attends the Japanese design meetings and reviews, and they attend the NASA reviews, and they all spend a lot more time on airplanes. But it’s still worth it, because Japan gets an instrument they don’t have the expertise to build at this point, and the US gets access to a whole mission’s worth of scientific data for just the cost of an instrument. Everyone wins.

“But only if we make it work,” Boyce says. “So four, five, six, or more times each year several of us hop on a plane for a week in our other homes here in Japan. Kampai!”

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OH AND DID I MENTION? All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center. And while we’re at it, links to websites posted on this blog do not imply endorsement of those websites by NASA.

Here’s a dramatic short video from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) “Pick of the Week” website. The images were actually captured by one of the twin STEREO spacecraft.

click me to watch the video!



Here’s the detailed explanation from the Pick of the Week site:

As the STEREO (Behind) spacecraft observed in extreme UV light, the sun popped off no fewer than six eruptions over just two days (Aug. 14-15, 2010). At one point, three were occurring events at the same time. Most these were eruptive prominences in which cooler clouds of gases above the surface break away from the sun. The most powerful of these events, a coronal mass ejection, began around 6:30 UT on Aug. 15. It was harder to see from this spacecraft’s angle since it blasted out from the whiter active region in the lower center, so it had the sun as its backdrop.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________ OH AND DID I MENTION? All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center. And while we’re at it, links to websites posted on this blog do not imply endorsement of those websites by NASA.

ocean bloom

MONDAY AUGUST 16: MODIS Image of the Day posts beautific satellite snapshot of microscopic plant life in the oceans blooming off the coast of Newfoundland.

On the edge: The IBEX spacecraft reports from the electrifying edge of Earth’s magnetic bubble.

More awesomeness: NASA Blueshift’s Weekly Awesomeness Roundup revisits a recent Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope discovery, the Perseid meteor shower, and a visit to Goddard by the local Fox TV station.



home sweet home

TUESDAY AUGUST 17: On the Goddard Flickr gallery, the latest GOES-13 satellite full disk view of Earth.

Billions and billions: The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Facebook page reports that the LOLA surface mapping instrument has shot more than a billion pulses of laser light at the moon’s surface.

Pulsar discovery: NASA’s Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) sees the first fast X-ray pulsar to be eclipsed by its companion star.

More about RXTE: On NASA Blueshift, blogger Maggie Masetti takes a close look at two recent discoveries made using data from the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer.

From Russia with science: NASA scientists trek (and blog) from Western Siberia on the Earth Observatory’s Notes From The Field.



WEDNESDAY AUGUST 18: NASA Blueshift ponders whether Hubble Space Telescope should go to a museum.

THURSDAY AUGUST 19: The Dawn spacecraft is now less than a year from arriving at asteroid Vesta. Read all about it on Science@NASA:

Honey, they shrunk the moon: NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter finds evidence of a cooling, contracting lunar crust.



Grab that Miracle-Gro! Decline in global plant growth documented by NASA satellites.

Earth buzz: The What On Earth blog highlights steamy July temps, the lowdown on the shakedown in the Gulf, and our planet in its grayest and gloomiest glory


FRIDAY AUGUST 20: On this day 35 years ago, Viking 1 left for Mars.

What On Earth Is That? NASA Earth blogger Adam Voiland posts another mystery image waiting for you to identify. Looks like dried mud flats to me. . .

Get a GRIP: Visit NASA hurricane scientists inside the DC-8 as it flew into the remnants of Tropical Depression Five over southern Louisiana.

Viking 1 gazes out at the surafce of Mars. . .

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________ OH AND DID I MENTION? All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center. And while we’re at it, links to websites posted on this blog do not imply endorsement of those websites by NASA.

Some images are so extraordinary you don’t have to say all that much. And you don’t even need color.

So, briefly, here is an image snapped by the MESSENGER spacecraft, now exploring Mercury. The big blob is us, the littler blob is our moon. MESSENGER snapped the image May 6, 2010, from 114 million miles away — greater than Earth’s average distance from the sun.

And that’s all I gotta say about that. Read more about it at OnOrbit.



Earth and its moon

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OH AND DID I MENTION? All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center. And while we’re at it, links to websites posted on this blog do not imply endorsement of those websites by NASA.

The late John New, founding director of the NASA Goddard Test and Evaluation Division (NASA photo)

A NASA pioneer passed away recently. His name was John New, and his legacy to us fills large volumes of space in the Building 7-10-15-29 complex at Goddard Space Flight Center. These vast spaces are host to the famous giant clean room, centrifuge, space vacuum chamber, and assorted other large and impressive looking gadgetry.

Goddard’s test facilities are vital to the success of NASA’s science missions. Testing ensures that spacecraft costing hundreds of millions to develop and build work as designed when exposed to the harsh temperatures, pressures, and radiation of space — not to mention the mechanical and gravitational abuse of rocket launches.

John New orchestrated the construction and outfitting of these testing facilities. An obituary in the Sunday Washington Post will fill you in on all the details of New’s life and work.

I learned a bit about Mr. New from Ed Powers, a retired NASA civil servant engineer who was quoted in the Post article. I got hold of his cell phone number earlier today and, on a whim, called him.

I reached him on his recumbent bike as he was pedaling along the Capital Crescent Trail. No, seriously. I interviewed him as he rode a bike — a first in my career! He said it was also his first on-bicycle interview.

Powers, 75, was not a close colleague of New’s but he did he use his testing facilities plenty of times. Powers started at NASA in 1962 as a thermal engineer — the people who deal with shielding and shedding heat from spacecraft, among other things.

Powers says all of the major, large test facilities in Goddard’s buildings 7, 10, and 15 dated to New’s watch as founding director of what was then called the Test and Evaluation Division. The testing facilities are now all centralized under Goddard’s Applied Engineering and Technology Directorate. The big clean room came after New retired to pursue farming.

As Powers decribes New, the former “T&E” division chief had the qualities of a get-it-done manager. “He ran a tight ship,” Powers says, huffing only mildly as he cycled along the Potomac River. “He knew what he wanted.”

Powers retired in 2001, although he still works as a consultant with NASA doing technical reviews of projects, including the Global Precipitation Measurement and Magnetospheric MultiScale missions. Both are based at Goddard.

Like the handful of other Goddard “old timers” I’ve had the pleasure to talk to, Powers cites the “tremendous freedom” and spirit of can-do innovation that the NASA employees of New’s time enjoyed.

Let’s hope that spirit outlives them all.



[Take a closer look at Goddard’s modern spacecraft testing facilities in this spooky video…..]



_____________________________________________________________________________________________________ OH AND DID I MENTION? All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center. And while we’re at it, links to websites posted on this blog do not imply endorsement of those websites by NASA.