Volume 17 • Issue 1 • Fall 2020
Heliophysicist Eftyhia Zesta Goddard’s Office of the Chief Technologist has named heliophysicist Eftyhia Zesta as this year’s FY20 Internal Research and Development (IRAD) Innovator of the Year, an honor the office bestows annually on individuals who demonstrate the best in innovation.
Photo Credit: NASA
cuttingedge • goddard’s emerging technologies
Office of the Chief Technologist Announces FY20 IRAD Innovator of the Year:
The office also awarded a special team award to a collection of Goddard scientists and engineers who recently won or are completing a handful of small heliophysics missions that will help scientists better understand the Sun-Earth connection (Page 5). An expert in measuring magnetic fields, Zesta pioneered the development of smaller, cheaper, and less power-hungry magnetometers. These instruments are ideal for small and mid-sized missions and in areas where magnetic background noise can render more-specialized sensors impractical. Magnetometry is a basic measurement of space environments, so much so that almost every NASA mission flies some means of measuring the local magnetic field. Smaller, cheaper magnetometers
in this issue:
Fall 2020
make it possible to monitor local and global fluctuations in Earth’s magnetic fields and poles through distributed networks of CubeSats. The information gleaned will be valuable to NASA for the protection of astronauts and satellites in orbit, as well as other government agencies and operators of private satellites in low-Earth orbit. v
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Chief Technologist Announces FY20 IRAD Innovator of the Year: Eftyhia Zesta
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Meet the Innovator: From a ‘PhD in Digging’ to Fleets of Orbiting Magnetometers
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Team Achievement: Heliophysics Investigations in Small Packages
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Dennis Andrucyk: Nurturing Diversity to Deliver the Future, on Schedule
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Miniaturized Lidar System Advanced for Next-Generation SmallSat Remote Sensing
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Building an Adaptable, Self-Driving Navigation Guidance and Control System
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Goddard’s Maven of Tech Passes the Torch
About the Cover Heliophysicist Eftyhia Zesta was named Innovator of the Year for her groundbreaking work advancing the technologies we use to track our Sun’s effects on Earth’s magnetic fields. Her innovations in magnetometry hold the power to transform humanity’s exploration of space. (Photo Credit: NASA/Goddard/Rebecca Roth)
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www.nasa.gov/gsfctechnology
