Announcing Dr. Dan M. Goebel as Technical Advisor

Dr. Dan M. Goebel is a Fellow and Senior Research Scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and an Adjunct Professor of Electrical and Aerospace Engineering at UCLA. He earned degrees in physics, electrical engineering, and applied plasma physics from UCLA. At JPL, he serves as Chief Engineer of the Psyche Mission and leads development of advanced electric propulsion and other spacecraft technologies.

Dr. Goebel is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, AIAA, IEEE, and APS. He has authored more than 350 journal and conference papers, co-written two textbooks on electric propulsion, and holds 60 patents.

For NewOrbit, Dan’s expertise in electric propulsion is especially relevant as we prepare AURA for its maiden flight.

What makes you excited about VLEO?

The exciting opportunities provided by the shorter ranges to the ground in VLEO to improve imaging, remote sensing and data transfer are offset by the difficulties of drag makeup and sputtering/erosion in the environment of the upper atmosphere. I am most interested in optimizing electric thruster design for this application.

What excites you about NewOrbit Space?

NewOrbit is starting from a clean sheet of paper to apply new technologies and develop alternative techniques to solve these problems. It's not often that I get the opportunity to think fully innovative and out of the box on interesting problems like these.

The Psyche Spacecraft