Monthly News Summary – August 1999
Apollo Anniversary Observed
by Terri Gregory, SSEC Public Information Specialist
August 1999
Also In
the News…
Regional media came to SSEC on July 20, the 30th anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing. WISC-TV, Madison’s Channel 3, interviewed Bob Paulos, program manager for many of SSEC’s current space flight hardware programs, and Evan Richards, who manages SSEC’s engineering services. Many SSEC employees remember warmly those early days of the manned space flight program, none more so than Evan, who worked for Collins Radio building communications and data elements of the Apollo program. Evan described how his Cedar Rapids neighborhood went suddenly quiet on a busy summer afternoon, when neighbors crowded around television sets to watch Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon. Evan’s recollections were used in 6 and 10 o’clock nightly news programs.
Evan appeared on WHA Radio’s drive-time call-in show on the 20th, to chat with listeners and host Ben Merens about the Apollo program and NASA’s current space program. Callers shared stories of where they were on July 20th 30 years ago. Evan recounted his own experiences and talked about the importance of the Apollo program in getting the manned space program started. According to Evan, the practical importance of Apollo was that we “developed the discipline of how to do things reliably.”
For more information, follow the links below.
Published
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Bill Hibbard, director of SSEC’s scientific visualization project, is writing a monthly column for Computer Graphics magazine, the official journal of SIGGRAPH. Bill’s first column tackles “Top Ten Visualization Problems.” The column is highly readable and would interest those outside the professional computer graphics community.
Several images produced by CIMSS researchers were used in the 1998 report of NOAA’s National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service. NESDIS is the parent organization of CIMSS’ Advanced Satellite Products Team at SSEC. The images represent sea surface temperature work of Gary Wade (NESDIS) and Fred Wu (SSEC), and the biomass burning research of Elaine Prins (NESDIS) and Joleen Feltz (SSEC). Elaine was also included under Special Recognition. She received an Administrator’s Award for her group’s work in developing an automated technique for detecting fires using geostationary satellite imagery. Also listed in the report are some of the many papers published by CIMSS scientists in 1998.
Outreach and Education
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SSEC’s outreach Web site is listed first in Potential Education and Public Outreach Partners, a DePaul University Web site. DePaul’s Space Science Center for Education and Outreach is one of NASA’s “five regional Broker/Facilitators” serving the science and education communities in the upper Midwest. “NASA’s Office of Space Science (OSS) has established an education and public outreach ecosystem, which serves as a network for space science education, fostering a wide variety of highly leveraged education and public outreach activities that will be disseminated across the country.” SSEC’s outreach coordinators Sanjay Limaye and Rose Pertzborn provide teacher workshops and give a variety of presentations in space science to teachers, students, and parents.
Over the Air
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Weather Guys Jonathan Martin and Steve Ackerman appeared again on Larry Meiller’s call-in show on WHA Radio. On July 21, Jon and Steve answered questions from 13 listeners (in 35 minutes of air time) on a variety of summer weather issues, including tornadoes, serious thunder storms, and lightning. It was a lively conversation.
On the Net
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Channel 3000, WISC-TV’s Web site, featured Rob Holmes’ Web site, The Ice, as a July Site of the Week. Based on the work he does with UW–Madison’s automatic weather station program in Antarctica, the site has received more than 90,000 visits in the four years it has been up. Rob puts Antarctic information and history on his site and has “tried to create a page that can be enjoyed by the youngest of children as well as adults.”