From Bonaventure to Goddard: How I Got to NASA and What I Am Doing There

The presentation, accompanied by slides when appropriate, will describe how a young physics major travelled from the classrooms of Saint Bonaventure, to the graduate research laboratories of the University of Florida in Gainesville, and finally to the government laboratories of NASA at the Goddard Space Flight Center just north of Washington, D.C. The main portion of the presentation concerns NASA missions of interest to the general public and supported in part by research work he does. Such, for example, is the current flagship mission of NASA, the James Webb Space Telescope that is destined to replace very soon the Hubble Space Telescope. In addition to these NASA telescope missions, a mission to an asteroid, coined the OSIRIS REX program, is in process and will be described.