Q&A – Page 2 – Spaceflight Now

Q&A with Dan Hart, president and CEO of Virgin Orbit (members only)

August 31, 2018

Dan Hart leads a staff of hundreds of engineers and technicians developing LauncherOne, a commercial air-launched booster intended to hurl small satellites weighing up to 1,100 pounds (500 kilograms) into orbit.

Q&A with Andrew Driesman, project manager for Parker Solar Probe (members only)

July 31, 2018

Andrew Driesman is project manager for NASA’s Parker Solar Probe mission at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, leading a team of engineers and operators in charge of the first mission to fly through the sun’s atmosphere.

Q&A with Heino Falcke, principal investigator of the Netherlands-China Low-Frequency Explorer (members only)

June 1, 2018

Heino Falcke, an accomplished radio astronomer at Radboud University in the Netherlands, leads a team of European scientists and engineers who developed a scientific receiver flying on China’s Queqiao spacecraft flying to a point in space beyond the far side of the moon.

Q&A with Mimi Aung, Mars Helicopter project manager at JPL (members only)

May 14, 2018

Mimi Aung leads a cadre of engineers developing the Mars Helicopter, an aerial drone set to fly to the Red Planet with the Mars 2020 rover.

Q&A with Bruce Banerdt, principal investigator on NASA’s InSight mission (members only)

May 3, 2018

Bruce Banerdt leads the InSight science team, and is in charge of the lander heading for Mars to study the red planet’s interior structure, collecting data that should yield new information about the environment in the early solar system, when planets coalesced and formed 4.5 billion years ago.

Q&A with Sara Seager, deputy director of science on NASA’s TESS mission (members only)

April 15, 2018

Sara Seager is an astrophysicist and planetary scientist at MIT, and she serves as deputy science director on NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, which aims to find planets around stars relatively close to the sun, searching for worlds that are ideal follow-up targets for missions like the James Webb Space Telescope.

Q&A with George Ricker, principal investigator for the TESS mission (members only)

April 14, 2018

George Ricker, an astronomer and pioneer in space imaging sensor ships at MIT, leads the science team for NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite.

Q&A with Mike Laidley, vice president of Orbital ATK’s Next Generation Launch program (members only)

April 10, 2018

Mike Laidley leads development of Orbital ATK’s Next Generation Launch system, a rocket the commercial space company hopes will provide a foothold in the lucrative market to launch U.S. military satellites, a business currently dominated by SpaceX and United Launch Alliance.

Q&A with Guglielmo Aglietti, RemoveDebris principal investigator (members only)

April 2, 2018

Guglielmo Aglietti is the director of the Surrey Space Center in Britain, and he leads a team of scientists and engineers who developed an experiment named RemoveDebris to demonstrate techniques to approach, capture and remove space junk from orbit.

Q&A with Josef Aschbacher, director of ESA’s Earth observation programs (members only)

October 13, 2017

Josef Aschbacher, head of ESA’s Earth observation programs, recently spoke with Spaceflight Now about the importance of the Sentinel 5P satellite mission designed for air quality measurements from space, and discussed increasing data usage from Europe’s Copernicus environmental network, and plans to expand the flagship Earth observation fleet.