Home Page for Walter Schmidt

Employer: Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI)

Current position: Research Manager in the Radar and Space Technology Group

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)
  

History:

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:

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