Edward Patrick

Background

About Edward Patrick

Ed is a 5th-generation cabinetmaker and 1st-generation research scientist & rocket plumber. For the last 37 years, he has had the pleasure of working in laboratories at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base (under Alan Garscadden), NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (under Hasso Niemann & Paul Mahaffy), and Southwest Research Institute (under Dave Young, Hunter Waite & Jim Burch) operating ultra-high vacuum (UHV) systems for theoretical and applied science research. Thirty-one years of this R&D have been in the development, fabrication and operation of laboratory space environment simulation systems supporting space flight mass spectrometry. His specialties include rolling up his sleeves, getting dirty, and solving mechanical and system problems in the most difficult of laboratory situations, sometimes by building something from virtually nothing. Upon departing Goddard Space Flight Center former colleague and lab manager Dan Harpold told him, “Thanks for doing all the things no one else could do,” the highest professional praise he has ever received. In 2011, Ed was the principal investigator (PI) leading a team in the first-ever deployment of a mass spectrometer into a cave environment. The prototype instrument was deployed into several South Texas caves, including Natural Bridge Caverns, Robber Baron Cave, and Bracken Cave - home to the largest population of bats in the world. His recent work studies the trapping of volatiles at the lunar surface using lunar soil simulant (JSC-1A) and Apollo 11 sample 10084, with implications for the physics of trapped gases and volatiles such as H2O, CO2, CO, and NH3 on the Moon, as well as similar getter-like materials on the regolith surfaces of Mercury and the asteroids. Ed has supported such space flight instruments as the Cassini Ion and Neutral Mass Spectrometer (INMS), Huygens Gas Chromatograph Mass Spectrometer (GCMS), the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument suite aboard the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL)"Curiosity" rover, Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) Lyman Alpha Mapping Project (LAMP), Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) Hot Plasma Composition Analyzer (HPCA), and the Mass Spectrometer for Planetary Exploration (MASPEX) aboard NASA's Europa Clipper. Ed is currently developing a prototype mass spectrometer for operation at the lunar surface through the NASA-funded Environmental Analysis of the Bounded Lunar Exosphere (ENABLE) project seeking to produce a combination of pressure sensing and mass spectrometry capable of spanning 15 orders of magnitude in dynamic pressure range at the surface of the Moon.