Dan Goebel
California Institute of Technology
Seminar Information
Engineering Building Unit 2 (EBU2)
Room 584 (5th Floor, through hallway doors)
Seminar Recording Available: Please contact seminar coordinator, Jake Blair at (j1blair@ucsd.edu)
The Psyche spacecraft was launched into space on Oct. 23, 2023 from Kennedy Space Center on a Falcon Heavy Rocket. The launch was the beginning of the spacecraft’s 2.2 billion mile journey to the asteroid 16 Psyche, located in the outer part of the main asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. The Psyche asteroid is composed of mostly metal, and possibly is the metal core of a planetesimal whose formation between Mars and Jupiter was interrupted early in the history of the solar system by collisions with other bodies that created the asteroid belt. The Psyche spacecraft is a hybrid, where Maxar, a major provider of communication satellites and now famous for taking photographs from space over Ukraine, fabricated the spacecraft bus based on heritage hardware from its product line, and JPL installed scientific payload, avionics and autonomous flight software for deep space operation. This $900M NASA mission is enabled by solar electric propulsion, which was first flown by Hughes Aircraft in 1997. Psyche will be the first spacecraft to use electric Hall thrusters in deep space to rendezvous and orbit the asteroid. A two-year science program will then determine its composition and remanent magnetic field to determine if this unique object really is a planetary core…and what that actually looks like.
Dr. Dan M. Goebel received a B.S. in physics, an M.S. in electrical engineering, and a Ph.D. in applied plasma physics from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1977, 1978 and 1981 respectively. He is a Fellow and Senior Research Scientist at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and an Adjunct Prof. of Electrical Engineering and Aerospace Engineering at UCLA. At JPL he is the Chief Engineer of the Psyche Mission and also responsible for the development of advanced electric propulsion systems and other spacecraft technologies. Previously he worked at Hughes Research Laboratories and Hughes/Boeing Space before joining JPL in 2003. Dr. Goebel is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, and Fellow of the AIAA, IEEE, and APS. He is the author of over 150 technical journal papers, 175 conference papers, two textbooks on Electric Propulsion published in 2008 and 2023, and holds 59 patents.