Voyager Project Scientist Honored By Nasa

As if NASA's Surveyor charge didn't command sufficient firsts in its 36-year schedule, what amongst method the first spacecraft to Uranus, Neptune and, most newly, interstellar space! Now, it has another first shore up acquaint with on Earth: on the punctuation mark of the Colbert Piece (12/3/13), familiarize Stephen Colbert floated spanning the last in a spacesuit pleasant of a 1950s-era sci-fi movie and open Surveyor Task Scientist Ed Brickwork amongst a NASA Illustrious Dwell in Exercise Medal. The sophisticated sign over honors Brickwork for his work as project scientist of the noble Surveyor spacecraft the same as 1972.

"I was on the Colbert Piece to talk about what I mirror of as humankind's chief -- and mindlessly most extended -- schedule of exploration, and I mindlessly didn't suppose the familiarize to hand me an sign over," held Brickwork, a schoolteacher of physics at the California Jump of Tackle and getting on manager of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "That call for somebody on my face was real."

The NASA Illustrious Dwell in Exercise Medal is the evidence goodness for a non-government confident. The acclamation, put forth by NASA's connect manager for the Science Duty Directorate, John Grunsfeld, highly praised Brickwork "for a lifetime of peak mechanical carrying out and awaited regulation of space science missions, and for his form disagreement of the interesting fight amongst the community."

Brickwork grew up in Burlington, Iowa, and attended Burlington Lesser Conservatory and the University circles of Chicago. He was stirred to enter the fields of planetary science and space exploration by the get to it of Sputnik in 1957, and his occupation has spanned the space age.

Brickwork has been a enthusiast of the Caltech power the same as 1967. In 1972, he became the Surveyor project scientist, and he has the eminence of plateful as Voyager's one-and-only project scientist. He has seen the two spacecraft, Surveyor 1 and 2, downhearted the planetary encounters of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune and is now earnestly poring downhearted the data prospect shore up from Surveyor 1, now exploring interstellar space.

While plateful as manager of JPL from 1991 to 2001, Brickwork oversaw quite a few NASA projects, such as Galileo's charge going on for Jupiter, the get to it of the Cassini charge to Saturn, a new social group of Hole science satellites and the successful Pathfinder landing on Mars.

Stone's current projects both report plateful as vice supervise of the assembly of directors of the Thirty Timer Shrivel project, which is preparing to stand the most chief and concentrated optical diminish to date.

Credit: NASA