The Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) is a major NASA space research laboratory located approximately 6.5 miles (10.5 km) northeast of Washington, D.C., in Greenbelt, Maryland, United States. Established on May 1, 1959, as NASA's first space flight center, GSFC employs about 10,000 civil servants and contractors. Named for American rocket propulsion pioneer Robert H. Goddard, it is one of ten major NASA field centers. GSFC is partially within the former Goddard census-designated place; it has a Greenbelt mailing address.
Charles Stark "Doc" Draper was an American scientist and engineer, known as the "father of inertial navigation". He was the founder and director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Instrumentation Laboratory, which was later spun out of MIT to become the non-profit Charles Stark Draper Laboratory.
NASA's Independent Verification & Validation (IV&V) Program was established in 1993 as part of an agency-wide strategy to provide the highest achievable levels of safety and cost-effectiveness for mission critical software. NASA's IV&V Program was founded under the NASA Office of Safety and Mission Assurance (OSMA) as a direct result of recommendations made by the National Research Council (NRC) and the Report of the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. Since then, NASA's IV&V Program has experienced growth in personnel, projects, capabilities, and accomplishments. NASA IV&V efforts have contributed to NASA's improved safety record since the program's inception. Today, Independent Verification and Validation (IV&V) is an Agency-level function, delegated from OSMA to Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) and managed by NASA IV&V. NASA's IV&V Program's primary business, software IV&V, is sponsored by OSMA as a software assurance technology. Having been reassigned as GSFC, NASA IV&V is Code 180.
Dava J. Newman is an American aerospace engineer. She is the director of the MIT Media Lab and a former deputy administrator of NASA. Newman is the Apollo Program Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics and Engineering Systems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has been a faculty member in the department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and MIT's School of Engineering since 1993.
Dr. Kimberly A. Weaver is an American astrophysics astronomer and professor. She has worked with NASA on several research projects. She is often seen on television programs about astronomy. She is an expert in the area of x-ray astronomy.
Valerie L. Thomas is an American data scientist and inventor. She invented the illusion transmitter, for which she received a patent in 1980. She was responsible for developing the digital media formats that image processing systems used in the early years of NASA's Landsat program.
Sabrina Nicole Thompson is an American aerospace engineer. As a Flight Dynamics Lead Analyst at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, Thompson has developed orbits and trajectories for various NASA missions and mission concepts. She founded a Baltimore-based fashion brand, Girl in Space Club, which garnered press coverage in 2022 on its projects to develop flight suits and space suits for female astronauts.
Aprille Joy Ericsson is an American aerospace engineer currently serving as the assistant secretary of defense for science and technology. Ericsson is the first African-American woman to receive a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Howard University and the first African-American woman to receive a Ph.D. in engineering at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC).
Dr. Colleen Hartman is currently the Board Director for the Space Studies Board as well as the Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in Washington, D.C. She was the deputy center director for Science, Operations and Performance of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and most recently, was the Director of the Science and Exploration Directorate. Previously she was acting Associate Administrator of the Science Mission Directorate (SMD), Deputy AA of SMD and presidential management intern, served as a senior policy analyst at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and served as deputy division director for technology at NASA Headquarters.
Beth A. Brown was a NASA astrophysicist with a research focus on X-ray observations of elliptical galaxies and black holes. She earned a Ph.D. in Astronomy from the University of Michigan in 1998, becoming the first African-American woman to do so.
Emily Dawn Calandrelli is an American science communicator, engineer, author, and television presenter. She is the host and an executive producer of Xploration Outer Space and previously Emily's Wonder Lab.
Mahmooda Sultana is a Bangladeshi-American scientist working for NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. She leads a team which won a $2 million technology development award for a nanomaterial-based detector platform in 2019. Sultana became a NASA research engineer in 2010. She received her PhD in chemical engineering in 2010 from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and BSc in chemical engineering and mathematics from University of Southern California summa cum laude. She joined NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in 2010. She has led the development of graphene-based detectors at NASA Goddard. Her research interests include graphene, nanomaterials, micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMs) devices, and sensors.
Farah Alibay is a Canadian systems engineer at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory who has worked on the InSight, Mars Cube One, and Mars 2020 missions.
Tiera Guinn Fletcher is an American aerospace engineer. She is a designer and structural analyst for NASA's Space Launch System.
Claire Lucille Parkinson is an American Earth scientist and climatologist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
Moriba Kemessia Jah CorrFRSE is an American space scientist and aerospace engineer who describes himself as a "space environmentalist". He specializes in orbit determination and prediction, especially as related to space situational awareness and space traffic monitoring. He is currently a full professor of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at the University of Texas at Austin, a position he attained in 2024, and a National Geographic Explorer. Jah has co-founded Privateer Space x Orbital Insight, GaiaVerse, and Moriba Jah Universal. His work now broadly focuses on decision intelligence to improve the stewardship of the planet and beyond.
Fadji Zaouna Maina is a Nigerien Earth scientist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. She was previously working in the field of hydrogeology at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory where she used computational model using supercomputers to study the effects of climate change on water sustainability and predict future needs. Her research has demonstrated that wildfire in California counterintuitively increase the water availability in the watersheds, as the barren lands impact the snowpack dynamics. She also studies the potential effects of drought in African Sahel region, advocating for a holistic response including girl education and family planning, increase in agricultural production and local security.
Catherine Walker is an American Earth and planetary scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, where she is on the scientific staff in the Department of Applied Ocean Physics and Engineering. Her research spans fracture mechanics and dynamics in ice, cryosphere change, physical oceanography, and geomorphology on Earth and other planets and moons using a variety of methodologies including remote sensing.
Professor Kerri L. Cahoy is an electrical and aerospace engineer and a professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT. She is also the co-founder of laser communications firm SpaceRake. Cahoy is the leader of the Space Telecommunications, Astronomy and Radiation Laboratory (STAR) at MIT, and she is most well known for her research in studying planetary atmospheres and exoplanet atmospheres along with her technology demonstration work on nanosatellites.
