National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Meet the RXTE Learning Center Team

Dr. Jim Lochner - Dr. Jim Lochner initiated the RXTE Education and Public Outreach program while he served in the RXTE Guest Observer Facility. He created this site with James Humphreys during the summer of 1995. Jim went on to become the E/PO Lead for the HEASARC and for the Suzaku mission, and eventually became the E/PO Lead for the Astrophysics Science Division at NASA/Goddard. In 2011, he started a 2-year assignment as the Program Manager for E/PO within the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters.

Maggie Masetti - Maggie, a graduate of Penn State physics and astronomy, is the primary programmer for our learning center. She has written science articles, worked on lesson plans with teachers, and created graphics for it. She currently does education/public outreach, web development, and social media for the James Webb Space Telescope. She has seen Star Wars: The Phantom Menace more times than she cares to admit, though she says that was a long time ago and she was very young then.

Our Teacher Contributors

Lisa Williamson - Lisa was a teacher at Drew Freeman Middle School in Maryland when she joined us in the summer of 1999. She helped us to design our Space Journey Adventure Unit! She also developed a workshop with us for the Spring 2000 NSTA meeting.

Rachelle Andrews - Rachelle was our Teacher Intern for the summer of 1998; she wrote a lesson plan on Graphing with RXTE. She also evaluated our "Shedding a New Light on the Universe" feature.

Bud Worth - Bud was the Summer Teacher Intern for 1997. He contributed by helping us "Tour the ASM" on an X-ray photon. He wrote the ASM Lesson Plan on making your own weather map.

James Humphreys - One of the originators of the RXTE Learning Center, he spent the summer of 1995 with us at Goddard Space Flight Center as a Teacher Intern. He is responsible for the RXTE Learning Center lesson plans on X-ray pulsars, X-ray bursters, and precessing accretion disks.

Special Thanks to:

Ed Sabol - Ed is our Perl and CGI Guru. He helped us out with the cgi-scripting involved with our dynamic ASM web tools.

Our Mascot

Rossi the Chipmunk - Rossi, the "web-savvy" Chipmunk, is the fearless mascot of the RXTE Learning Center. He is named after Bruno Rossi.