Augsburg News

News Archives - 2001

Chief Administrator of NASA, Daniel S. Goldin, Augsburg College Commencement speaker

Apr. 02, 2001

Kirsten Hiemstra and Patrick Flood tour Mexico City.

Daniel S. Goldin, chief administrator of NASA, will be the keynote speaker at commencement ceremonies Sunday, May 20 at Augsburg College. The title of Goldin's commencement address is "Grandfather Knows Best and Lessons From the Universe."

Special guests at the commencement and at the luncheon, which precedes the ceremony, will be members from the Minnesota division of the Tuskegee Airmen, World War II black military aviators, who were the first African-Americans to qualify as military pilots in any branch of the armed forces.

Augsburg College is the first purely undergraduate institution to be connected to NASA's Space Physics Analysis Network (SPAN), one of the predecessors of today's Internet. Augsburg physics faculty and undergraduate students have been involved in space science since 1970, when they participated in the analysis of data from NASA's first satellite in geosynchronous orbit, ATS-1. Since that time, Augsburg personnel have been involved in the construction of three NASA sounding rockets and analysis of their observations; in the analysis of data from many research satellites, including ATS-6, Explorer 4, Atmosphere Explorer-C, -D, and ­E, Dynamics Explorer ­1 and ­2, AMPTE CCE and IRM, Geotail, Wind, Polar and cluster; and in correlative observational studies of the Earth¹s space environment using ground-based instruments at high latitude sites throughout Antarctica and the Canadian Arctic.