Gary Rottman, SORCE Principal Investigator, accepted the “NASA Group Achievement Award” on behalf of the SORCE Mission Team on Tuesday, August 24th. This award is presented to a group in recognition of an outstanding accomplishment which has been made through the coordination of many individual efforts and has contributed substantially to the accomplishment of the mission of NASA. The NASA Honor Awards Ceremony was held in Greenbelt, Maryland.

SORCE Program Manager, Tom Sparn, received NASA’s Public Service Award in recognition of his outstanding leadership and distinguished contributions to the SORCE Mission. This medal is awarded to a U.S. citizen who is not a federal government employee, for exceptional contributions to NASA’s mission. Tom has worked on the SORCE mission from the beginning in 1997, and has been extremely valuable in seeing it to fruition.

These awards coincidently come after eighteen months of successful operation on-orbit, which is a crucial milestone for SORCE because this is the criterion point NASA uses to determine mission success. SORCE has been on-orbit long enough to have obtained scientific success by collecting continuous TSI and SSI measurements. At LASP, plans to acknowledge and celebrate these special NASA accomplishments are in the works.

To read more, see the August 2004 newsletter.