Product Code Database
Sol Alan Stern (born November 22, 1957) is an American engineer, planetary scientist and private astronaut. He is the principal investigator of the New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Chief Scientist at Moon Express.
Stern has been involved in 24 suborbital, orbital, and planetary space missions, including eight for which he was the mission principal investigator. One of his projects was the Southwest Ultraviolet Imaging System, an instrument which flew on two space shuttle missions, STS-85 in 1997 and STS-93 in 1999.
Stern has also developed eight scientific instruments for planetary and near-space research missions and has been a guest observer on numerous NASA satellite observatories, including the International Ultraviolet Explorer, the Hubble Space Telescope, the International Infrared Observer and the Extreme Ultraviolet Observer. Stern was executive director of the Southwest Research Institute's Space Science and Engineering Division until becoming Associate Administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate in 2007. He resigned from that position after nearly a year.
His research has focused on studies of our solar system's Kuiper belt and Oort cloud, , the satellites of the , Pluto, and the search for evidence of planetary systems around other stars. He has also worked on space rendezvous theory, terrestrial polar mesosphere clouds, galactic astrophysics, and studies of tenuous satellite atmospheres, including the atmosphere of the Moon.
From 1983 to 1991, Stern held positions at the University of Colorado in the Center for Space and Geoscience Policy, the office of the vice president for Research, and the Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy. He received his doctorate in 1989. From 1991 to 1994 he was the leader of Southwest Research Institute's Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences group and was chair of NASA's Outer Planets Science Working Group. From 1994 to 1998 he was the leader of the Geophysical, Astrophysical, and Planetary Science section in Southwest Research Institute's Space Sciences Department, and from 1998 to 2005 he was the director of the Department of Space Studies at Southwest Research Institute. In 1995 he was selected to be a Space Shuttle mission specialist finalist, and in 1996 he was a candidate Space Shuttle payload specialist but did not have the opportunity to fly on the Space Shuttle.
In 2007, Stern was listed among Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People in The World.
On August 27, 2008, Stern was elected to the board of directors of the Challenger Center for Space Science Education.
In 2015, Stern was the recipient of Smithsonian Magazine's American Ingenuity Award in the Physical Sciences category.
On October 7, 2016, Stern was inducted into the Colorado Space Hall of Fame. Brevard Business News. "Foundation names honoree for Colorado Space Hall of Fame, event set for Oct. 7", vol. 34, no. 34, (Melbourne, Florida: 22 August 2016), p. 7.
Stern is currently active as a consultant for private sector space efforts and has stated:
On June 18, 2008, Stern joined Odyssey Moon Limited (Isle of Man), a private industry effort, as a part-time Science Mission Director/consultant in their efforts to launch a robotic mission to the Earth's Moon by participating in the $30 Million Google Lunar X-Prize competition.
In December 2008, Stern joined Blue Origin, a company that was founded by Amazon.com's Jeff Bezos as an independent representative for research and education Missions. The company has stated that its objective is to develop a new vertical-take-off, vertical-landing vehicle known as New Shepard that is designed to take a small number of astronauts on a sub-orbital journey into space and reduce the cost of space transportation. The company is located in Kent, Washington and has flight tested some hardware.
In 2012, Stern co-founded Uwingu.
On March 26, 2008, it was announced that Stern had resigned his position the previous day, effective April 11. He was replaced by Ed Weiler, who was to serve his second stint in the position. The resignation occurred on the same day that NASA Chief Michael D. Griffin overruled a decrease in funding for the Mars Exploration Rovers and Mars Odyssey missions that was intended to free up funds needed for the upcoming Mars Science Laboratory. NASA officials would neither confirm nor deny a connection between the two events.
Stern left to avoid cutting healthy programs and basic research in order to cover cost overruns. He believed that cost overruns in the Mars program should be accommodated from within the Mars program, and not taken from other NASA programs. Michael D. Griffin became upset with Stern for making major decisions without consulting him, while Stern was frustrated by Griffin's refusal to allow him to cut or delay politically sensitive projects. Griffin favored cutting "less popular parts" of the budget, including basic research, and Stern's refusal to do so led to his resignation.
Casting doubt on the theory that Stern resigned due to conflict with former Administrator Griffin is his statement of March 25, 2009 at spacepolitics.com:
On November 23, 2008, in an op-ed in The New York Times, Stern criticized NASA's inability to keep its spending under control. Stern said that, during his own time at NASA, "when I articulated this problem... and consistently curtailed cost increases, I found myself eventually admonished and then neutered by still higher ups, precipitating my resignation earlier this year." While complimenting NASA Administrator Michael D. Griffin, Stern suggested that Griffin's decision to again bail out an over-budget mission was motivated by fear "that any move to cancel the Mars mission would be rebuffed by members of Congress protecting local jobs."
Since leaving NASA, Stern has made criticisms of the budgetary process and has advocated for revamping its public appeal.
A 2000 paper by Stern and Levison proposed a system of planet classification that included both the concepts of hydrostatic equilibrium and clearing the neighbourhood used in the new definition, with a proposed classification scheme labeling all sub-stellar objects in hydrostatic equilibrium as "planets" and subclassifying them into "überplanets" and "unterplanets" based on a mathematical analysis of the planet's ability to scatter other objects out of its orbit over a long period of time. Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune were classified as neighborhood-clearing "überplanets" and Pluto was classified as an "unterplanet".
|
|
