Donald Rapp | The Cooper Union (original) (raw)

Donald Rapp - Personal Website http://www.drdrapp/com
drdrapp@earthlink.net
Brief Summary:

I have 62 years of post-doctoral experience. I am a true generalist. I am 50% scientist and 50% engineer. I have worked on an extremely wide variety of technical problems over the years and I have broad knowledge of things technical. I have a solid grounding in chemistry and physics and did fundamental work in these sciences for many years. In the second half of my career I worked on more applied problems, particularly in space technology and space mission design. I am an expert in requirements, architectures and transportation systems for space missions, with particular emphasis on impact of in situ resource utilization, and Mars water resources. I have surveyed the wide field of global climate change and ice ages and I am familiar with the entire literature of climatology. I am known far and wide in the NASA community as for my abilities to plan, organize and lead studies of broad technical systems. My services have been often sought in writing and reviewing major proposals for space ventures. I have written and published 8 books.

Since 2015 I have been working on the Mars MOXIE Project documenting progress and analyzing various aspects of the data and operations. In that work, I produced a large number of internal reports, as well as publications in journals.

In 2022 I was given the Gan Dunn award by the Cooper Union which "honors an outstanding alumnus for professinal achievement"

EDUCATION:

B.S. Chemical Engineering, Cooper Union, 1955
M.S. Chemical Engineering, Princeton, 1956

Graduate study, California Institute of Technology, 1957

Ph.D. Chemical Physics, University of California (Berkeley) - January, 1960

EXPERIENCE:

2015, co-I on Asteroid study for NIAC

2014-2020 (and beyond), Co-I on“MOXIE” NASA ISRU demonstration for 2020 Mars payload - consultant to MIT and JPL

2013, JPL Interim Employee to write MOXIE proposal

2010-2013, authored major works on climate change and missions to Mars

2008-2009 Research Professor, Viterbi School of Engineering, University of Southern California

2003-2009, JPL Consultant

1979-2002, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA; Senior Research Scientist and Division Chief Technologist, Mechanical Systems Engineering and Research Division; Retired February, 2002

1969-1981, University of Texas at Dallas:
1981 Resigned
1979-1981 On Leave of Absence while at JPL
1973-1979 Full Professor of Physics and Environmental Engineering
1969-1973 Associate Professor of Chemistry and Physics

1965-1969, Polytechnic Institute of New York: Associate Professor of Chemistry
1959-1965, Lockheed Palo Alto Research Laboratory: Senior Staff Scientist

In-depth summary of a lifetime of work can be seen here.
Some brief highlights of previous work:

In the 1960s and 1970s:

I showed the relationship between classical, semi-classical and quantum calculations of
vibrational energy transfer between molecules in molecular collisions.

I produced models for vibrational energy transfer in a variety of molecular collisions.

I developed simple models for electron transfer between atoms and ions in atomic collisions. I
showed how symmetric and asymmetric charge transfer processes were related.

I developed a set of simple approximate wave functions for the outer electron of an alkali atom,
and I used these to model electron transfer in collisions of alkali atoms with alkali atoms.

I set up a laboratory to measure ionization processes when electron beams passed through
gases, and I made fundamental measurements of cross sections for ionization of many atoms
and molecules.

With the advent of parallel processing on computers, I created math programs to diagonalize
matrices.

Some highlights of recent work:

Working as a consultant for the Mars MOXIE Project from 2015 through 2020 (and beyond), I
provided continuing documentation of work on the Project, I provided an end-to-end computer
model of the flows through the system, I cataloged the test data and analyzed it, and I provided
an analysis of prospects for scaling up to full-scale proportions.

Working with Ralph Ellis and Clive Best, we developed a model for ice ages over the past 2.7
million years and showed how the pacing of ice ages changed across the Mid-Pleistocene
transition.
Phone: 3239190867
Address: 1445 Indiana Ave.
South Pasadena, CA 91030

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