Goddard Space Flight Center

Located in Greenbelt, Maryland, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center was established in 1959. The center was named after rocket research pioneer Dr. Robert H. Goddard. Since its inception, Goddard has played a major role in space and Earth science. The center is involved in implementing suborbital programs as well, using aircraft, balloons, and sounding rockets. This function is located at the Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Virginia.

In the realm of astronomy, a spectacular morning launch of the Space Shuttle Discovery ten years ago, on April 24, 1990, ushered in a new golden age in star gazing. The payload in Discovery's cargo bay, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, was released by the crew into Earth orbit the next day and the universe has not looked the same since.

On Earth, the Goddard team is made up of some of the world's premier scientists and engineers devoted to research in Earth science, space science, technology, and space communications. Goddard's fundamental mission is to expand our knowledge of the Earth and its environment, the solar system, and the universe through observations from space.

Recent missions, like the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), with its scientific and operational nerve center at Goddard, continue to reveal surprising new details about the Sun's complex behavior. SOHO, a joint mission by NASA and the European Space Agency, has already found hot, electrically-charged gas, called plasma, flowing like a river beneath the Sun's surface. It has also helped scientists solve a mystery about why the Sun's high-speed solar wind travels twice as fast as theory predicts, showing that the solar wind "surfs" magnetic waves in the Sun's outer atmosphere.

The Hubble Space Telescope has spied a giant celestial "eye," known as planetary nebula NGC 6751.

The Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) spacecraft has become the world's primary sampler of extraterrestrial matter. Goddard's Transition Region and Coronal Explorer (TRACE) spacecraft has revealed frictional forces in the Sun's outer layer, or corona, that are hundreds of times stronger than expected. This friction, or viscosity, may help explain why the corona is more than 100 times hotter than the Sun's surface.

Since the first days of observing Earth from space in the early 1960s, NASA and Goddard have been pioneers in helping scientists, policymakers, and the general public gain a better understanding of how Earth's land, atmosphere, oceans, and life interact with each other.

The most extensive archive of images of Earth--nearly four million of them--originates from a series of orbiting, Goddard-managed satellites called Landsats. This archive is an invaluable record of changes in the land surfaces of Earth, from natural causes like volcanic eruptions to accelerating human development of urban areas, where more than 60 percent of the world's population will live by the year 2025. Landsat data has been used for everything from agricultural planning, real estate forecasts, forestry management, and mapmaking to oil exploration and airline pilot training.

The successful launch of the Landsat-7 mission in April 1999 was another major step forward in our investigation of Earth's land surfaces. Operated under the joint leadership of Goddard and the U.S. Geological Survey, a key feature of this program is the decrease in costs for images. This is making the information more easily accessible to a wider range of users.

Recent successes in measuring and modeling rainfall patterns and biological properties of the land surface, as well as important ocean studies, are the building blocks for more precise 14-day weather predictions and projections of biosphere changes.

The Atlas IIAS expendable launch vehicle with the Solar Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) before launch.

The Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM), launched in 1997, is providing new insights into how and where rainfall occurs during El Niño and La Niña events. These extreme weather patterns, which occur every three to five years, have far-reaching effects on people and property. In addition, incorporation of weather pattern data into global predictive models improves their predictive capabilities. Rainfall estimates by Goddard scientists are growing much more precise. Information from TRMM has significantly improved hurricane track predictions, and the NASA Seasonal Interannnual Prediction Project is developing techniques to use satellite observations of the ocean and land surface to improve predictions of El Niño and its impact on North America.

Future Goddard-sponsored missions will include the Swift Gamma Ray Burst Explorer, to be launched in 2003. Swift will be a three-telescope space observatory for studying gamma ray bursts. Although gamma ray bursts are the largest known explosions in the universe, outshining the rest of the universe when they explode in distant galaxies, the underlying cause of the explosions is an astrophysical mystery. Swift will have the unique ability to rotate in orbit and point its gamma ray telescope, X-ray telescope, and ultraviolet/optical telescope at gamma ray bursts within minutes of a burst's first appearance. Because gamma ray bursts are believed to originate billions of light years away, Swift will use these sources as a beacon to probe distant regions of the universe.

Also among Goddard's upcoming telescopes is the Next-Generation Space Telescope (NGST), set to be launched in 2009. NGST represents challenges on numerous engineering fronts, from light-weight structures to multi-segmented, deployable mirrors. The powerful NGST will be built to see objects 400 times fainter than those currently studied with larger ground-based infrared telescopes or their spaceborne counterparts. Moreover, NGST will study objects with the image sharpness achieved by the Hubble Space Telescope.

Whether making fascinating discoveries about the Sun's corona and how it affects our planet and the solar system, designing new ways of understanding the Earth's complex atmosphere and biosphere, or revolutionizing how we see the universe, Goddard is expanding the scientific knowledge that is enhancing our lives.