April 2023 Parsec Monthly meeting

In April our guest is Robert E. Harpold.

Robert E. Harpold is an engineer working for ERC, Inc., a subcontractor for NASA, designing trajectories for the Artemis missions. His article “Flybys, Launch Windows, and Selfies with the Earth and Moon” appeared in the March issue of DreamForge Anvil.  

On November 16^th, 2022, the uncrewed Artemis I mission was launched to the moon. As the first major spaceflight of NASA’s Artemis program, Artemis I marked the return of the agency to human lunar exploration originally begun with the Apollo program. Artemis I was the first integrated flight test of the Orion spacecraft and Space Launch System (SLS).

Robert Harpold’s presentation this month takes us behind the scenes of the Artemis I flight and gives us an idea of the amount of work that went into the entire Artemis I mission by focusing on the work of one team: the trajectory design team, responsible for creating the path the spacecraft would take from the Earth to the Moon and back again. We get to go behind the scenes where, after so many years, we’ve sent a human-rated spacecraft back to the Moon!

Robert E. Harpold has operated a weather satellite and a space-weather spacecraft for NOAA and, for a different NASA project, has flown over Greenland and Antarctica to collect data on their elevation changes. He is married to his amazing and accomplished wife Julie and has a young and very smart daughter named Isabelle.