By Don Cohen John C. Mather was study scientist and project scientist for the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) and principal investigator for the Far Infrared Absolute Spectrophotometer (FIRAS) on that mission.
By Karl Iagnemma Let me tell you a story. When I was a young, eager PhD student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) searching for a thesis topic, I would take long, late-afternoon walks around the Institute, hoping to stumble upon inspiration in the paint-scabbed hallways.
By George N. Andrew Many at NASA believe the myth that good engineers make good project managers. My twenty-eight years of experience in engineering and management have taught me that engineers are often poorly equipped to manage projects, but it isn’t always their fault.
By Hugh Woodward I remember the day I walked into the paper plant in Oxnard under a brilliant southern California sun with a pleasant cooling breeze blowing off the Pacific.
By Marc Spiegel Explaining to other people something complicated that you are working to understand yourself can be difficult. That was my situation when I began developing my Einstein Alive! program to introduce Einstein and the theory of relativity to students from kindergarten through middle school.
By Dan Holtshouse My first job was on the Apollo program. When I left Ohio State University with a graduate degree in electrical engineering, I went to work for AC Electronics in Milwaukee, Wis., then a division of General Motors.
By Matthew Kohut When Johnson Space Center’s Matt Lemke showed up for work as the project manager of the space-to-space communications system at the end of 1994, he looked forward to leading a team of NASA designers on the biggest project in his division.
By Randii R. Wessen and David Porter It’s amazing what you can do when you don’t have a choice. That exactly describes the Cassini mission to Saturn when its twin sister CRAF (Comet Rendezvous and Asteroid Flyby mission) was canceled.
By Charles Tucker “I tell people I’m a true geek,” Jay Pittman says, laughing. He’s driving on a two-lane strip of blacktop flanked by summer-green crops, heading seven miles southeast from the main base of Wallops Flight Facility toward a tiny barrier island off Virginia’s Eastern Shore, where the Wallops launch and research range stretches […]
