Home Page for Walter Schmidt
Employer: Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI)
Job activities:
- Project manager for the Portal node of the EuroPlaNet Integrated and Distributed Information Service IDIS
- Quality Assurance manager for the Solar Intensity X-ray and proton Spectrometer SIXS as part of ESA's Bepi Colombo Mercury project
- Project manager for the institute's CARL project (Comet and Asteroid Rendevous and Landing on Wirtanen) with various participations on the ESA cornerstone mission ROSETTA, orbiter and lander. Directly I am involved as PI of FMI's instrument PP (Permitivity Probe) on the lander and the mass-memory development for the CDMS (Central Data Management System) of the lander.
- Project manager for the plasma monitor SPEDE on ESA's SMART-1 Moon mission
- SWAN Since 1992 I was managing the project on behalf of FMI. This included operations specification, flight software specifications and development, integration and tests of the final hardware all over Europe and in the US, ground segment development etc. In short: most of the time traveling.
After the successful launch on December 2, 1996 supervising this instrument and occasionally problem analysis and recovery actions are still an ongoing activity besides the analysis of returned SWAN data. See also SWAN image galery.
Earlier activities:
- Head of the Space Research Division's Solar System Research group until 31.12.2007
- STARE Coherent Finish/Norwegian auroral radar (new design and construction from 1988-91)
- Mars-96 lander project (quality assurance)
- CoPAC (GOMOS Processing and Archiving Center) advisor and other odds and ends.
History:
Ph.D. thesis in molecular physics reaction dynamics as experimental study with laser induced fluorescence at the University of Freiburg/Germany (1980)
Physics assistant at the University of Kuopio (1980-82)
Head of computer operations at the European Incoherant Scatter Scientific
Association (EISCAT) in Kiruna/Sweden (1982-1988), since then here in Helsinki/Finland.
Private life:
German by birth I am married to Riikka, a Finn, have 3 daughters (Kristina,
Henrietta and Sofia), 1 boy (Henrik), 2 dogs (dwarf poodle Neppi and a 60kg
Rhodesian Ridgeback Tequilla), and a
Holsteiner Horse Luna.
Contactaddress:
Finnish Meteorological Institute
Earth Observation
Erik Palmenin aukio 1
P.O.Box 503 FI-00101 Helsinki, Finland
telefax: +358-9-1929 4603
telephone: +358-9-1929 4658
mobile phone: +358-50-3243 107
e-mail (Internet):
Walter.Schmidt@fmi.fi