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Mobile, Ala., Native Sabrina Savage Named Deputy Project Scientist for NASA’s Hinode Mission to Study the Sun

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. – Sabrina Savage, a research astrophysicist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., has been named deputy project scientist for Hinode, the joint U.S.-Japanese mission to study the sun.
Savage, who joined NASA as a full-time employee in summer 2012, specializes in the sun and solar activity. While helping to lead the Hinode team, she also will continue her research into solar coronal flows and will participate in missions to develop new solar monitoring instrumentation.
As a post-doctoral researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., from 2010-2012, Savage studied flows above active regions on the sun during long-duration flaring events, primarily using high-energy, extreme ultraviolet and X-ray space telescopes. Her primary goal is to understand turbulent solar processes and the rise of the magnetic field through the sun’s surface, and to determine how these dramatic solar upheavals can result in explosions like solar flares and coronal mass ejections.
The high-energy particles created during these events play a critical role in the dynamics of space weather. Extreme space weather influences the Earth’s atmosphere, threatens the function of satellites in Earth’s orbit, and potentially could impact communications systems and power grids on the surface.
A native of Mobile, Ala., Savage earned a bachelor’s degree in physics in 2002 from the University of South Alabama in Mobile. She received a master’s degree in physics and astronomy in 2004 from the University of Wyoming at Laramie, and earned a doctorate in physics from Montana State University in Bozeman in 2010.
Savage and her husband, Dr. Tyson Littenberg, have four children. They reside in Madison, Ala.
For more information about Hinode, visit:
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hinode/index.html

Janet L. Anderson
Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala.
256-544-0034
janet.l.anderson@nasa.gov