AAS to hand out DPS awards

Work in public outreach, lab techniques and instrument design, systems engineering, and the study of gas giants will be honored in October when the American Astronomical Society’s division for planetary sciences hands out four awards during its 38th annual meeting, held this year in Pasadena, California.

The Carl Sagan Medal will go to David Grinspoon, curator of astrobiology in the space sciences department at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, “for his energetic and successful efforts to get the general public thinking about planets, and about our place in the solar system and wider universe.” The citation also describes his two popular books, Lonely Planets: The Natural Philosophy of Alien Life (HarperCollins, 2003) and Venus Revealed: A New Look Below the Clouds of Our Mysterious Twin Planet (Perseus Books, 1998), as “detailed and thought-provoking treatments of serious subjects that describe scientific investigation in human and enticing terms.”

Dale P. Cruikshank will receive the Gerard P. Kuiper Prize for “his pioneering work in the application of infrared spectroscopy to solar system bodies, his development of laboratory techniques that have become tools for interpreting the observations, and his leadership in the design of instruments for remote sensing observations from deep space planetary exploration probes.” Cruikshank is a research scientist in the astrophysics branch of the NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field in California.

The Harold Masursky Award will be handed to Gentry Lee, chief engineer for the planetary flight systems directorate at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech. He is receiving the award “for his fundamental contributions to systems engineering in the complex world of robotic planetary missions, including the Mars rovers, Deep Impact, Cassini, Stardust, and Genesis, and for imparting this knowledge to a generation of young engineers at the early stages of their careers.”

Tristan Guillot will accept the Harold C. Urey Prize for his “fundamental contributions in the study of the interior structure of gas giant planets, their formation process, and their atmospheres under extreme environments. His accomplishments include detailed models of the internal structure of Jupiter and Saturn and studies of the late emergence of gas giants.” Guillot is a researcher for CNRS at l’Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur in Nice, France.