David Dooling
Dave Dooling has been education and public outreach officer at the National Solar Observatory at Sunspot, NM, since October 2002. Previously he was in Huntsville, AL, for 30 years where he was science editor of The Huntsville Times for eight years and then worked with NASA in various capacities. He is co-author of Huntsville: A Pictoiral History (1980), Space Travel: A History (1985), and Engineering Tomorrow (2000). He has won writing awards from the National Space Club and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. He holds a master of science in space studies from the University of North Dakota and is working on a second master's in science education at Montana State.
Mr. Dooling's program is titled: Building the World's Largest Solar Telescope
The last decade of solar observations have shown that understanding how the Sun behaves as a star requires studying its smallest features at spatial scales 33 times finer than conventional telescope. NSO and its partners have been developing the Advanced Technology Solar Telescope (ATST) and hope to be funded in 2009-10 to start construction at Haleakala, Maui. ATST will have a 4-meter primary mirror, making it the world's largest optical solar telescope.It will also be capable of imaging the bright solar disk and the ultra-faint corona. It design poses several significant engineering challenges, including adaptive optics to produce high-resolution images of solar activity, and thermal engineering to protect the telescope from the Sun. I will discuss the design of ATST, why it is needed, and why we are pursuing a ground-based rather than orbital design.
Special added feature: A quick review of the Sunspot Solar System Model, a 1:250-million-scale model of the solar system spanning the highway leading to Sunspot and with elements across New Mexico.
