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Awards & Honors

AWARDS & HONORS

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Welcome to the awards page for Goddard's Science and Exploration Directorate! Goddard is proud of its workforce and our goal is to help our civil servant and contract personnel and staff obtain recognition for their outstanding achievements from their professional communities, NASA, and the Goddard Space Flight Center.

This website is designed to help you locate community, NASA and Goddard award opportunities for your colleagues in Code 600 and to provide contact information for internal prize committees. We hope to facilitate getting deserving people nominated for the right prizes and to communicate our awardees to our management and the external community.

please nominate deserving scientists for appropriate awards and help them receive recognition for their outstanding work!

Featured Honors

2007

Mario Acuna in Lab
Dr. Mario Acuña elected member of National Academy of Sciences
Dr. Acuña, Code 695, a renowned authority on Space Magnetometry and Principal Investigator, Co-Investigator, Instrument Scientist and Project Scientist for many NASA missions, has been elected as a member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). NAS members are chosen in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.
Ann Hornschmeier Receives 2007 Cannon Award
Dr. Ann Hornschemeier (Cardiff), Code 662, will be awarded the 2007 Annie Jump Cannon Award for outstanding astronomical research and promise for future research by a postdoctoral woman researcher. She is being honored for her X-ray investigations of distant galaxies.
Harvey Moseley to Receive the 2007 Joseph Weber Award for Astronomical Instrumentation
Dr. Harvey Moseley, Code 665, has been selected to receive the 2007 Joseph Weber Award. The Award, named for the University of Maryland physicist who built the first detectors for gravitational waves, recognizes an individual scientist for the design, invention or significant improvement of instrumentation leading to advances in astronomy. The Weber Award is conferred on Dr. Moseley "for his extraordinary contributions over two decades to the development of astronomical detectors covering a huge wavelength range-from X-rays to the submillimeter".
Steve Maran Awarded 2007 Van Biesbroeck Prize
The AAS has selected Dr. Stephen Maran, retired from Code 600, to receive the 2007 George Van Biesbroeck Prize. It is normally awarded every two years to honor an individual for long-term extraordinary or unselfish service to astronomy. Steve is being recognized for his long service as the AAS' Press Officer.

2006

Dr. John Mather and Dr. George Smoot win 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics!
Code 665's John Mather has been awarded the Nobel Prize, together with George Smoot of U. Cal. Berkeley for mapping the anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation. The work cited is based on measurements with Goddard's Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite, launched in 1989. Congratulations John!!
2006 Nordberg Memorial Award goes to Dr. Charles R McClain, Code 614.2
Dr. Charles R McClain is the winner of the 2006 William Nordberg Memorial Award for Earth Science. Chuck was recognized for his long standing contributions to Ocean Color research, distinguished service to SeaWIFS, MODIS and VIIRS, and his efforts contributing to a NASA award winning data processing and distribution system for ocean related satellite products.
John Mather and COBE Science Team win 2006 Gruber Cosmology Prize
The Gruber Prize gold medal and $250,000 were presented to Dr. Mather, Code 665, at the IAU meeting in Prague. The purpose of this Cosmology Prize is to acknowledge and encourage further exploration in a field that shapes the way we perceive and comprehend our universe.
2006 Bruno Rossi Prize Winner - Tod Strohmayer, Code 662
(with colleagues Deepto Chakrabarty, and Rudy Wijnands)
Citation: The 2006 Rossi Prize of the High Energy Astrophysics Division of the American Astronomical Society is awarded to Tod Strohmayer, Deepto Chakrabarty, and Rudy Wijnands for their pioneering research which revealed millisecond spin periods and established the powerful diagnostic tool of kilohertz intensity oscillations in accreting neutron star binary systems.
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Awards & Honors

SED Nobel Prize Winner

photo of Dr. John Mather

Directorate scientist John Mather and collaborator George Smoot of U. C. Berkeley received the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics.